Greek Legumes

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Greek cooking has relied on legumes for as long as it has relied on olive oil. Beans, lentils, chickpeas, and fava are not a side note in the Greek kitchen: they are the base of the weekly table, simmered with tomato and oil, or dressed with lemon, onion, and herbs. This collection brings together the pulses we source from Greek growers, from PGI Gigantes beans of Prespes and Kastoria to Farsala lentils, split fava and peeled chickpeas. All of them travel from Greece to your kitchen. What Greek legumes are Ask a Greek what the national dish is, and a fair number will answer fasolada, a white bean soup with olive oil, carrot, and tomato. Legumes carry that weight in Greek food culture. Gigantes plaki, the large white beans baked in tomato sauce, is the dish that comes out of the oven at Sunday lunch. Revithada, the chickpea stew of Sifnos, was traditionally left overnight in the village baker's oven and eaten the next day. Fava, the yellow split pea puree of the Aegean, is served warm with raw onion and a thread of olive oil. There is a practical reason behind all of this. The Orthodox calendar has a long list of meatless days, and Greek cooks built an entire repertoire of satisfying, protein-rich dishes around pulses. That repertoire is now one of the pillars of the Mediterranean diet: a plant-based source of protein and fibre, eaten regularly rather than occasionally, and cooked with olive oil rather than despite it. Two ways Greece eats legumes Dried legumes for slow cooking This is the traditional pantry: beans, lentils, chickpeas, and split fava, dried and stored. They ask for an overnight soak and an unhurried simmer, and they give back a depth of flavour that no shortcut reproduces. The gigantes we carry are PGI beans from Prespes and Kastoria in northern Greece, where the cold nights and the altitude give a thin skin and a floury interior. The lentils and the fava come from Farsala, in Thessaly. We also carry an organic line and a mixed legume and buckwheat b