Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one man SLAVES AWAY OVER A HOT STOVE, AND THIS IS THE THANKS I GET? I’m your aggrieved author and arguable subject of the title, Jon O’Guin. Today’s recipe is…actually incredibly fast and simple, because last week I was VERY crunched for time, and because it has been very hot around my hometown, so I wanted something that didn’t require a hot stove, or really any heat at all to handle (also because while I had a more involved recipe, I decided to put it off for a week, for reasons I’ll explain later.) So if you want to jump straight to the action, with a White Bean Dip here’s the link. Everyone else…well, this won’t be a long trip, but let’s take a quick walk.

I Dip, You Dips, Bean Dips

I know I’m referencing a song there, but I legitimately don’t remember which one. I think it’s an old school hip-hop song. Anyway: this is one of those frustrating topics to discuss/research because like, one of the first things we started doing with cooked legumes was smash them into paste. There are recipes for such concoctions dating back to the Roman empire. Then there’s hummus, Britain’s mushy peas, refried beans, etc etc.

Here’s some mashed peas, on top of mashed potatoes, on a pie. Aussie food is amazingly bold in its utter lack of care.

So it’s kind of impossible to pin down where exactly this recipe comes from. I first saw it, probably a decade or more ago now, as “Tuscan White Bean Dip”, and that’s probably because of the beans used: Cannellini beans, aka White Kidney Beans. First grown in South America, but popular in Italy, the beans serve as a nice, relatively bland canvas on which you can paint a lot of different flavors. This version is a super-basic Italian edition, but you can riff on it in literally thousands of ways. Indeed, the recipe book I’m using “America’s Test Kitchen: Easy Foods Five Ways” is based on that: they present the core recipe, and then 4 relatively simply changes you can make to take the recipe in different directions.

I think it’s a fun way to highlight what I call the “Grammatical” approach to cooking: the idea that sure, THIS recipe uses these flavors…but if you know how the pieces fit together, you can just swap out chunks to take it in a new direction. THIS batch is flavored with rosemary, olive oil, garlic, and lemon, but you could swap in roasted red peppers, almonds, and paprika for a Spanish flavored one, do like, parsley and goat cheese, there’s a ton of options.

And…that’s really all I have for context/set-up. I didn’t have some high-minded arc when I whipped it up; I actually threw it together while my breakfast was cooking in order to have something to upload today. I could suggest that it makes a nice easy option for a party dip…but now’s not exactly a great time for parties in America, now is it? I suppose right now the best use of it would be as a component of a ‘stay-cation’: while the 90 degree heat is a pain to me while I’m trying to work, a couple hours on a patio or lawn with some Italian bean dip, some drinks, and some deck chairs is probably plenty of people’s idea of a relaxing time.  

I vastly prefer to wait until the sun is at least NEAR the horizon.

Whip it Up

So, this is a 2 step recipe, and the second step is basically “wait”. The first is “blend”. As you can guess, I’m going to struggle a little to fill this time. I guess the first thing we gotta do is rinse the beans.

Go on and rinse the beans
Sha na nanana…na?
I don’t know how many na’s there are there.

I don’t THINK this liquid is useful for much, unlike the aquafaba from a can of chickpeas (though apparently you can use it in some recipes for texture, but it depends a lot on the brand of bean you’re using: some cans have very salty/goopy/tinny liquid, some don’t.) Just rinse it off a couple times. I always just use the lid to hold the beans as I drain the water.

Next, some olive oil! I finally bought some at the store last night, since I’d been putting off going to Costco to buy it due to travel time and worry about lines, so I decided “better to get like, a quart of it from Safeway, than keep waiting to get a half-gallon”. You’ll also add some water, as well as lemon juice.

This is the degree to which I was reaching for pictures. Lemon juice.

You might think of this as “blending together beans and a light vinaigrette.” You’d technically be WRONG to think that, but it’s a very fiddly kind of wrong, so it works for most purposes (the ratio of oil to acid is way too high for this to be a legit vinaigrette: those are normally 2:1 or 3:1, this is a 4.5:1 ratio.)

A bit of salt and pepper, and some minced rosemary, which only mildly offended me by smelling of soap.

Ah yesh, my anshient enemy.

And a single “minced” clove of garlic. I put that in quotes because, in order to keep today fast and easy, I just grated my garlic, rather than mincing it. This technically makes a sharper garlic flavor, which might not be to everyone’s cup of tea, but I wasn’t going to re-microwave my breaskfast sandwich a third time while I hand-minced.

That bit of garlic skin looks like a Decepticon logo.. Is my grater plotting against mankind?

Then, it’s a pinch of cayenne (a common pepper for cutting through fatty mixtures like thes, and 45 seconds of blending, with a scrape down at 15 and 20 seconds. The results were…very beige.

It looks fairly ranch-like, from this picture, but I assure you, the texture is different.

Just let that sit for 30 minutes before eating (Which gave me time to go and eat my breakfast),  and technically you want to drizzle a little extra olive oil over it before serving, but I skipped that for the moment.

The results are perfectly fine. For 5ish minutes of effort, they’re actually pretty good. Like I noted earlier, rosemary isn’t my favorite flavor, so maybe one of the variants, or as one person on the website suggests, a little bit of red pepper flake, will punch it up. Also, apparently in their area a local Italian place sells it for $6 a pint, and let me tell you, that is a HELL of a mark-up. Ingredient wise, this is like, $1.50, tops, and labor wise, again, it’s like, 5 minutes. For that starting point, this is definitely a success.

And….yeaaaahhhhh. that’s what I’ve got. Real short post today. Sorry, but I promise you I’m working to build up stuff coming soon.

THURSDAY: JON DOES SOMETHING, GOD ONLY KNOWS WHAT.

MONDAY: JON GETS SLOPPY, AND SAUCY, AND SLAW…Y. “KOREAN” SLOPPY JOES.

Recipe

White Bean Dip

Makes 1 batch, roughly 1.25 cups

Ingredients

1 (15-ounce) can cannellini beans, rinsed

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil (separated into 3 tbsp and 1 tbsp)

2 tablespoons water

2 teaspoons lemon juice

1 teaspoon minced fresh rosemary

1 small garlic clove, minced

¼ teaspoon table salt

¼ teaspoon black pepper

Pinch cayenne pepper

Preparation

1. Blend the beans, 3 tbsps oil, and literally all other ingredients in a food processor for around 45 seconds, scraping down sides as needed, until smooth and slightly whipped up.

2. Scrape into a bowl, and let sit at room temp (covered) for 30 minutes for the flavors to meld. Serve with crostini/chips/pita/whatever.