This is a nutritious and wonderfully satisfying vegetarian dish. The name ‘yiyantes’ comes from the Greek word for giant (‘giant beans’). Yiyantes can be cooked a couple of different ways, and in this recipe Eva shows us how to prepare these giant beans in tomato juice baked in the oven (plaki-style).
3 cups of large lima beans (yiyantes)
½ cup of olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
4 pieces of garlic, finely diced
1 cup of chopped carrots
1/4 cup of finely chopped parsley
2 cups of crushed tomatoes, or tomato juice
Salt and pepper
Place 3 cups of washed lima beans in a large bowl and cover with water. Allow the beans to soak in the water overnight. Drain the water and pour the beans into a large pot of boiling water and blanche them for about 5 minutes.
In a large pan, add the olive oil and sauté the onions. Add the garlic, carrots, salt and pepper.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
After about 5 minutes of boiling the beans, remove them from the heat and drain the water. Place the beans in a large pan. Add the tomato sauce to the beans. Add 4 cups of water and mix well to ensure the tomato sauce is evenly spread.
Allow the beans to cook in the oven for about an hour at 350 degrees.
Serve as a side dish or as the main meal. Enjoy!
What a fabulous idea for a blog, to not only preserve your recipes for following generations, but to preserve the way you make them and talk about them, beautiful.
Hi,
Great recipe, I haven’t seen beans prepared like this before. And the video presentation was so effective. We want to do the same on our new cooking blog (we’re working on it!), and this was very inspiring.
Judith Kingsbury, Savvy Vegetarian
I love beans baked this way – delicious!
Thanks for friending me on FoodBuzz. I love Eva – she’s so much like my mother. I’m so making the Tyropita. I’ll blog about it within the next few days – hope that’s okay.
Oh definitely that’s okay giz (thanks :)) – and thanks everyone for the kind words
Fantastic recipe! I love gigantes.
Wow… thats a wonderful recipe! The best part of it is being a vegetarian recipe for foodies like me..
Great, I’m glad everyone likes it!
I love this Dish! i carry excellent Gigantes imported from Greece for this if anyone is interested.
What have you got please, I have just paid $3.45 canadian for 750g of Large Krinos and $9.99 for 2 lbs of noname. Krinos not that easily available.
Tom Pierce Vancouver Canada
i was really excited when i found this recipe- the only one i could find where the beans didn’t need a lot of boiling first thus making it simpler…. however, i followed the recipe but the beans were still rock hard after an hour! we ended up leaving them over 2 hours in the oven and even then lots were still not edible. the sauce was delicious though and the ones that were cooked were amazing! i am trying it again today but i have boiled my beans for about 40 minutes. Hopefully this will work better!
Hey Chazwyn,
I find that letting the beans soak overnight in a bowl of water really helps
Thanks for the video. It made things very simple. I watched the video twice and wrote everything down. I am sorry to say that I will not tell my wife where I got the recipe from instead I will say to her that this is an ancient Greek recipe.
Evan a.k.a. Vaggelis
What a wonderful video! It looks like she used a pressure cooker and that is why she only boiled the beans for 5 min. The beans must be boiled for one hour after soaking overnight.
Love this recipe.
I wish I realized that it was a pressure cooker. I messed up on thus recipe. The sauce tastes great though and will try again
Thank you very much for this recipe! I make it at least every other week, now. I’ll never be able to go for the canned variety again. This is one of my favorite meals, now!
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