How To Cook Cannellini Beans

Hi there, I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School, and today, I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. Hello, I'm going to show you how to cook cannellini beans today. That's what they look like.

Once they've been harvested, they're then dried, packaged up and actually these days, you can get them from any good supermarket. When they are harvested, they're everywhere, hence the need to dry them out so that people can use them at a later date. You need to reconstitute them, which means covering them in water which I'm going to do here.

But you also need to leave them overnight. If you want to speed the rehydration process, you can use baking powder or bicarbonate of soda, maybe a teaspoon for that sort of quantity. But what I've done in advance, because watching those beans dry would be worse than watching paint dry, but I've already done that and you can see they double in about size, they double in size there.

And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put these in a pan, cover them with cold water, and I'm just going to grab my light. What will happen now is, those beans will come up to the boil and as soon as they come up to the boil, I'm just going to drop it down to a gentle simmer until they're cooked. Now, I reckon from boiling, so from when the water comes up to boiling, you're probably looking at ten minutes cooking time as it's boiling, and then drop it down to another say twenty to thirty minutes.

Now, the interesting thing about beans is, well, the vital thing for you to know is that cooking times really do vary. If the beans have been knocking around for six months a year, it can take a lot longer for them to reconstitute and also to cook, and if that's the case, my advice is always cook the beans off in advance. Maybe the day before you're going to cook them and then just finish them off to order, because if you're leaving it to chance, you may find that it takes, I don't know, a couple of hours to cook them rather than your standard ten minutes in boiling water and then following thirty minutes thereafter.

Hope that makes sense. Come back in about thirty minutes and these beans will be cooked and we'll plate up. Right, what happened was the water came up to the boil, I then left them to cook for ten minutes, dropped it down to a gentle simmer.

I know that they are cooked because I have checked in advance because that is how it all works, you see. And what I am going to do is just pass these through a sieve like that and we're going to plate up. Let's just grab my spoon.

Now, what you could do is you could mix these with bread crumbs, an egg, some onions and make nice little bean burgers out of them. I'm just going to serve them as normal today with my standard issue hot drizzle of olive oil, a little bit of black pepper, and then just to finish the dish off, as is my want, the thing I'm always banging on is don't serve a dish like that, because it just looks a bit flat, but if you put some form of leaf on, what it does is just gives the dish a bit more height and looks like it has been made with love and passion. So, there you have my way of cooking cannellini beans. .