Easy and warming recipes for cooking beans

Use hours at home to cook beans for soups, stews or hearty baked dishes.

By Ben Mims

March 16, 2020

Boston Baked Beans

6 hours 25 minutes

Serves 6 to 8

Classic, sweet and smoky, baked beans are perfect for cold, rainy days, no barbecue required.

Baked giant white beans with tomatoes. Recipe here.

Baked Gigantes (Oven-Baked White Beans)

1 hour 45 minutes

Serves 6 to 8

This recipe makes use of creamy giant white beans and caramelized onions for warming, rib-sticking dinner.

Mayie's Beans from Wool Growers in Bakersfield. Read the recipe »

Basque-Style Beans

2 hours

Serves 8 to 10

These Basque-style simmered beans from Wool Growers in Bakersfield are full of flavor from rendered salt pork.

Canned chickpeas, baked in chicken broth with aromatics, are served up with bracing, crunchy watercress dressed with lemon.

Brothy Baked Chickpeas With Chilled Lemon Watercress

1 hour 10 minutes

Serves 4.

Lightly smoked or spicy cured meat perfumes canned chickpeas with a long-cooked flavor.

A hearty and filling winter vegetarian soup. Recipe: Soup with winter greens and chickpeas

Winter Greens and Chickpea Soup

1 hour 30 minutes

Serves 8

A simple pot of soup, this recipe makes great use of canned chickpeas (you can use any beans) and a bunch of hearty greens for a healthy, warming soup.

Giant White Bean Soup

2 hours 15 minutes

Serves 6

This is a classic treatment on cooking a pot of beans, Italian-style. A few simple aromatics perfume the broth and legumes, making them extra flavorful for a variety of uses.

Ben Mims

Ben Mims is a former cooking columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He has written three cookbooks and has worked as a food editor and recipe developer for several food media publications, such as Lucky Peach, Food & Wine, Saveur, Food Network and Buzzfeed/Tasty.