Gigantes plaki, or (very) big baked beans, occupy a similarly beloved place in the Greek heart to our own baked beans. However, though they are also available in tins, they’re rather more likely to be made from scratch. They pop up on restaurant menus as well as at home, both as a warm stew – which, because it’s easily made vegan (though my version isn’t), is particularly popular during Lent – and served at room temperature as part of a meze selection.
Unsurprisingly, few Greek cookbooks are without their own version: Rena Salaman sells her gigantes plaki as “a sensational dish, splendidly vegetarian, luxuriously rich”, while Georgina Hayden calls the dish an “absolute classic” in her book Taverna and Christos Sourligas admits he “can eat bowlfuls” of the stuff (me, too, after this week). Given that we should all be consuming more fibre-packed beans and pulses, this is a recipe well worth adding to your repertoire, too.
