Recipe by Dewi Salim

Roasted Garlic and Cannellini Bean Dip

Name: Roasted Garlic and Cannellini Bean Dip
Prep time: 10 min
Yield: 8

Serves8 people

Prep10 min

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BELAZU Flavour Hack Roasted Garlic (130g)

$9.95

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Two tins of cannellini beans, two tablespoons of roasted garlic paste, a lemon and good olive oil, blitzed for 90 seconds. Serves 8 as a dip with crackers. Prep 10 minutes, no cooking, and nothing in it needs to be bought fresh on the day.

Jar of Belazu Flavour Hack Roasted Garlic 130g, the roasted garlic paste blended through this cannellini bean dip

Ingredients

Serves 8 as a dip. Prep 10 minutes, no cooking. Everything here except the beans, the lemon and the herbs is a cupboard item that keeps for months, which is what makes this a good thing to have a plan for in December.

For the dip
2 x 400g	tins cannellini beans, drained, 3 tbsp of the liquid kept back
2 tbsp	BELAZU Flavour Hack Roasted Garlic
60ml	BELAZU Early Harvest extra virgin olive oil, plus more to finish
1	lemon, all the zest and about 2 tbsp of the juice
1/2 tsp	fine sea salt, plus more to taste
	black pepper
To finish
1 tbsp	olive oil, poured over at the last minute
1 small handful	flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
1 pinch	dried chilli flakes, optional
To serve
1 packet	VPC Artisan Pita Olive Oil and Sea Salt, broken into shards
1 packet	VPC Crackerthins Gluten Free Black Pepper
100g	Kangaroo Island Mediterranean olives
	carrot, celery and radish, cut into batons

Doses, swaps and how far a jar goes

Two tablespoons is a medium dip that everyone at the table will eat. Three makes it assertive and is the right call if it is going out beside olives and salami. A 130g jar holds roughly ten tablespoons, so one jar is five batches of this, which is the argument for keeping one in the door of the fridge. Butter beans in place of cannellini give a softer, sweeter dip; chickpeas give a firmer one that needs an extra tablespoon of liquid. The rest of the Belazu range is worth a look if this becomes a habit.

Why a jar of roasted garlic instead of a head of garlic

Roasting a head of garlic properly takes 45 minutes at 200C and heats the kitchen to do it, which in December is a poor trade for four cloves of paste. Belazu Flavour Hack Roasted Garlic is 63 per cent grilled Spanish garlic cloves with rapeseed oil and salt, so the work is done and the sweetness is already there. That matters more in a cold dip than in a cooked dish. Raw garlic in a bean puree keeps getting stronger: it is mild when you taste it, sharp an hour later and genuinely hot by the time the second round of drinks comes out. Roasted garlic has had that edge cooked out of it and tastes the same at 8pm as it did at 6pm.

The texture problem, and how to fix it

Blitzed beans want to be claggy. They are starchy, they hold very little water, and a short blitz gives you something closer to hummus paste than to a dip. Two things fix it, and both are free. The first is the liquid from the tins: keep three tablespoons of it and add it a spoon at a time with the motor running, because it carries starch and emulsifies rather than just thinning. The second is time. Run the processor for a full 90 seconds, not 20. The difference between a grainy bean dip and a silky one is almost entirely how long you were prepared to stand there.

Method

Drain the beans over a bowl and keep 3 tablespoons of the liquid. Rinse the beans under cold water until the water runs clear, which takes about 20 seconds and removes the tinned taste.
Tip the beans, the roasted garlic paste, the lemon zest, half the lemon juice and the salt into a food processor.
Blitz for 30 seconds, then scrape the sides down with a spatula. There will be a ring of unmixed bean around the top of the bowl every time.
With the motor running, pour in the olive oil in a thin stream. Give it another 30 seconds.
Add the reserved bean liquid a tablespoon at a time until the dip drops slowly off a spoon rather than sitting on it. You may not need all three.
Run the processor for a final 30 seconds without stopping. This is the step that turns it from grainy to silky, so do not shorten it.
Taste. It will almost certainly want more salt and the rest of the lemon juice. Beans absorb seasoning, so season it once, wait a minute, then season it again.
Spread the dip into a shallow bowl and drag the back of a spoon through it to make a groove. Pour the last tablespoon of olive oil into the groove, scatter the parsley and the chilli flakes, and serve with the pita shards, the crackerthins and the olives.

Make ahead and leftovers

This is better on day two. Make it the night before, keep it covered in the fridge, and the garlic and lemon settle into the beans instead of sitting on top of them. It keeps four days. It firms up in the cold, so take it out 20 minutes before serving and beat a tablespoon of water or lemon juice through it to bring it back. Do not freeze it: the beans go mealy and no amount of beating fixes them.

Leftovers stop being a dip and become a spread. Push it onto toast under a poached egg, thin it with more lemon and use it under grilled lamb, or drop a spoonful into a bowl of soup instead of cream. Once the jar of garlic paste is open it lives in the fridge and wants using within two weeks, which is easier than it sounds: it goes into mashed potato, through a tray of roast vegetables in the last 10 minutes, and into a vinaigrette with mustard.

Common questions

How long does bean dip keep in the fridge?

Four days in a covered container, and it is at its best on days two and three. Press a piece of baking paper onto the surface if you want to stop it darkening at the edges. If it has been sitting out on a table in a warm room for more than two hours, throw the remainder out rather than putting it back in the fridge.

Can I make this dip without a food processor?

Yes, and it will be rustic rather than silky. Warm the drained beans for a minute in a dry pan, which softens their skins, then mash them hard with a potato masher or the back of a fork before beating in the garlic paste, oil and lemon. A stick blender in a tall jug is the closer substitute and gets you most of the way. What you cannot do is skip the liquid, because a hand-mashed dip is always drier than a machine one.

What do you serve with a white bean dip?

Something crisp and something raw. Broken shards of pita and a plain or peppered crackerthin do the crisp half, and carrot, celery, radish and cucumber do the raw half without adding another rich thing to the table. Olives and a bowl of nuts round it out. Our guide to which cracker goes with which cheese applies here too, and there are more standing-up ideas in our Christmas finger food round-up.

The paste, the oil and the crackers all sit in our gourmet condiments and crackers ranges, alongside the rest of festive entertaining essentials. Shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100.