Giant Beans in the oven

If you live in the UK, the best that can match their size is butter beans. Aim for the largest ones! Giant beans are a bit bigger than them. If you live close to a Turkish or Greek supermarket, I am sure you find some. (sometimes they are also named “elephant beans”).

A pressure cooker would be really helpful for this one.

Ingredients :

1. 0.5 kg (1 packet) of giant beans
2. a few (2-3) carrots
3. olive oil
4. 1 large onion
5. 2 cloves of garlic
6. 1 can of chopped tomatoes
7. 1 bay leaf, parsley, salt, pepper

Overall, there are 3 steps for the recipe: prepare the beans, prepare the sauce, put them in the oven for 10-15 minutes!

Step 1: prepare the beans

• We leave the beans overnight into a container with (lots of) water, for them to soak.
• The next day, we put them in the casserole and let them boil for a couple of minutes.
• Meanwhile we peel and slice the carrots. When the two minutes have passed, we drain the beans, and we add fresh water from the tap (not too much of water now). We throw in the carrots and a bit of salt/ pepper to taste.
• I use a pressure cooker, so when it starts whistling I leave it for another 25-30 minutes (depends on pressure cooker, kitchen hob, etc.)

Step 2: prepare the sauce

• Finely chop the onion and the cloves of garlic.
• Warm in a saucepan in low heat the oil and add the chopped onions/ garlic.
• As soon as the onion goldens (browns), add the can of tomatoes, parsley, bay leaf, salt and pepper.
• Leave to boil for around 10 minutes.

Step 3: Mix them in the oven (10-15 mins, 200 degrees)

• Preheat the oven to 200 degrees (for fan-assisted ovens go for 170).
• Open the pressure cooker and put the beans to a deep tray.
• If there still is lots of water in the pressure cooker, leave it open for a few minutes until there is very few water left.
• Add the sauce and mix.
• Put the tray into the oven for 10-15 minutes, until a thin “skin” is created.

Enjoy with salty cheese (preferably feta) and dry white wine!

Adding sausages

A very tasty variation of this recipe consists of adding sausages. For 500gr of beans we add around 200-250gr sliced sausages. Before preparing the sauce, we sizzle them in the frying pan with some olive oil for 5 minutes. We remove them, and then without adding any additional oil we prepare the sauce. When the sauce is almost ready, we throw the sizzled sausages back in. The photo in this page is from this variation using Frankfurter’s sausages.