Gigante Bean

Forgot to soak your beans? Good news: You can still make a great pot.

This thrifty riff hinges on canned butter beans and a juicy grated tomato marinade.

Plump white beans create a luscious broth combined with lemon zest, onion, garlic, and celery. A stealthy knob of butter adds just enough richness.

A lemony, herby bean salad with lots of crunch from sliced snap peas is good. But when it's piled on top of garlic-rubbed, ricotta-spread toast, it's even better.

This stew recipe is all about those lovingly cooked and seasoned dried beans and the glorious (vegan!) broth they create.

The halibut is brined briefly in salt water, which seasons it all the way through.

Stirring a raw egg yolk into each bowl at the end adds silkiness, heft, and protein.

Beans can roll with virtually any flavor profile, including bright fresh citrus, lime juice, and chiles in this wintery salad.

When your beans are tender, take them off the heat and focus on the cooking liquid, doctoring it with good olive oil, salt, and pepper, tasting and seasoning it until the liquid itself is straight-up delicious.

Customize it: Use carrot instead of celery root and any other white bean (gigante, cannellini) you like.

Gigante beans are our favorites, but almost any bean will be delicious this way. 

The Giant Bean Succotash is the ideal way to use up summer’s bounty.

We're seeing gigante beans everywhere. They're creamy and buttery, and their size adds a dramatic look.

Use the biggest beans you can buy for this Greek-inspired dish—baby limas are easy to find, but gigante beans are amazing too.

When your beans are tender, take them off the heat and focus on the cooking liquid, doctoring it with good olive oil, salt, and pepper, tasting and seasoning it until the liquid itself is straight-up delicious.

For the best flavor, marinate the chicken overnight. If you're short of time, use a 15-ounce can of cannellini or lima beans instead of the dried beans. With this rich, garlicky sauce, you need only a fresh salad to complete the meal.

If you've made another recipe that called for Garlic Mayonnaise and happen to have some left over in the refrigerator, a dollop of it on the plate makes a delicious addition to this hearty, rustic dish.

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Diane Kochilas's book Meze: Small Plates to Savor and Share from the Mediterranean Table. Kochilas also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Kochilas and Greek cuisine, click here. Giant beans in some form or another are never absent from Greek meze menus. The key to making this dish taste as good as possible is to use high-quality roasted sweet peppers preserved in extra virgin olive oil. I usually make my own oil, and have them on hand. All you need to do is roast the peppers whole under the broiler, let them cool, peel them, and store them in a container in the fridge covered with good olive oil. You can pour a few tablespoons of the pepper-infused oil into the baking dish for added flavor. As for the beans themselves, the trick is to get the texture right. Giant beans need first to be soaked, then boiled, and finally baked. Once done, they should be soft, almost buttery, without being baked to the point that they fall apart.