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Cannellini beans Recipes

2 recipes with cannellini beans for weeknights, meal prep, and quick ingredient searches. Choose by time, cuisine, and what is in your kitchen.

2 recipes

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Ribollita (Tuscan Reboiled Bread and Bean Soup)

🇮🇹ItalyAdvanced

Soups

Ribollita (Tuscan Reboiled Bread and Bean Soup)

Ribollita is a thick Tuscan soup of cannellini beans, cavolo nero (black kale), and stale bread — one of the central symbols of cucina povera (peasant cooking). The name means 'reboiled' (from the Italian ribollire), and that is the whole point of the dish: it is born from leftovers. Tuscan peasants would cook a simple vegetable soup called minestra early in the week, then the next day reheat what remained with the addition of stale bread, turning minestra into ribollita. The paradox of the dish is that it gets better the longer it sits and the more times it is reboiled. On day one it is still a brothy minestra di pane; on day two, after reboiling, it becomes true ribollita — dense and almost semi-solid. Its roots reach back to the Middle Ages in the plain of Pisa and the lands of Arezzo and Florence, where it was the main winter nourishment of the poorest. The three non-negotiable elements are cannellini beans, cavolo nero, and saltless Tuscan bread (pane sciocco), which stales within a day. By tradition the cavolo nero should have 'taken the frost,' which makes its leaves sweeter and more tender. Key techniques: blend half the beans for a creamy base without any cream, tear the stale bread by hand, and use potato plus bread as a double thickener until the soup is dense enough to serve almost on a plate. Yields 6 servings in about 2 hours of active and simmering time. Best the next day, served hot over garlic-rubbed toast with a generous pour of extra virgin olive oil and a glass of Chianti.

120 min280 kcal6 serves

🌱Vegan

★4.6

Soupe au Pistou (Provencal Summer Vegetable Soup with Basil Pistou)

🇫🇷FranceMedium

Soups

Soupe au Pistou (Provencal Summer Vegetable Soup with Basil Pistou)

Soupe au pistou is a Provencal summer vegetable soup with beans, crowned with a spoonful of pistou — the Provencal paste of basil, garlic, olive oil, and cheese. The dish comes from Provence in southeastern France, especially around Nice and the Cote d'Azur, and it is the essence of summer Mediterranean cooking: made at the peak of the season from the best vegetables at the market. Pistou is the Provencal cousin of Italian pesto; its name comes from the word for 'to pound,' just like pesto. The key difference: classic Provencal pistou traditionally contains no pine nuts — that is what sets it apart from Ligurian pesto. The soup is a close relative of Italian minestrone, since Provence borders Liguria, but the French version is finished with a big dollop of fragrant pistou that each guest swirls into their own bowl. That fresh pistou, added at the end, is what separates this from an ordinary vegetable broth. Technical keys: use only summer vegetables; mash half the beans for body without flour; never cook the pistou (heat kills the basil aroma and turns it bitter); keep the garlic in the pistou raw; and use fragrant, room-temperature basil. The classic version (per David Lebovitz) uses only water, so the vegetables shine, though vegetable broth is common. Serves 8 in about an hour, the pistou stirred in at the table, with crusty bread and a glass of Provencal rose.

60 min280 kcal8 serves

🌿Vegetarian

★4.4

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Other ingredients that appear most often alongside cannellini beans across the archive. Pick one to drill deeper.

cavolo nero stale bread Savoy cabbage basil zucchini green beans