Tender Beans with Herbs & Tahini
Cooked like this, these beans make a wonderful side, or add substance to a salad or soup, but I served them with a tangy herb dressing and a mustardy tahini sauce with dijon mustard and tahini. Very much inspired by Noor Murad’s wonderful green bean recipe in Ottolenghi’s Shelf Love (by the way a beautifully unconfined book to learn more about the art of layering flavours in true Ottolenghi style).
Ingredients
For the beans
- 300 g dried cannellini beans
- 3 whole garlic cloves
- 4 tbsp olive oil
- 2 strips of lemon peel (from the lemons below)
- 1 shallot or small onion
- 100 g kale with stems or 60g chopped leaves
- 1 pinch of chilli powder
For the herb dressing
- 40 g parsley with stalk, roughly chopped
- 60 g coriander with stalk, roughly chopped
- 25 g pine nuts
- 1 garlic clove, roughly chopped
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 4 tbsp olive oil
For the tahini Dressing
- 50 g tahini
- 1 garlic clove, finely crushed
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tsp mustard
Instructions
- The evening before, soak the beans in at least 3x the amount of water. The next day, preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Lightly crush the garlic cloves with your palm or the blade of a knife. Drain the beans, rinse them and add to a baking dish along with the olive oil, strips of lemon peel, shallot or onion (cut side down), 1 tsp salt and 650ml of water. If you're using whole kale leaves, strip the leaves and add the stalks to the beans as well. Cover the oven dish with kitchen foil and cook in the oven for 90 minutes or until the beans are tender. Remove the dish from the oven and let the beans cool off slightly.
- While the beans are cooking, make the herb dressing. Add all of the ingredients for the dressing along with 1/4 tsp salt and 50 ml cold water or 50g of ice cubes to a food processor and pulse into a pesto.
- For the tahini dressing, mix all of the ingredients together with 2 tbsp of cold water and 1/4 tsp salt. Keep adding water until you have a consistency that you can drizzle.
- Remove the shallot/onion, kale stalks, lemon peel and garlic, then drain the beans into a sieve, but keep the cooking liquor. Tip the beans into a bowl along with a generous splash of the cooking liquor (around 100 ml). Pour in the herb dressing and toss together, taking care not to break up the beans.
- Heat some olive oil in a large frying pan. Add the kale leaves along with a pinch of salt and fry until lightly charred. Add them to the beans and toss together. Spread the beans onto a plate and drizzle over the tahini sauce as well as the chilli powder.