Briljante Bonen (Brilliant Beans) by Bloeme Burema is my favorite cookbook that has come out this year so far. Bloeme has written an accessible, extremely useable cookbook while taking beans away from their more stodgy image with fresh exciting recipes with modern flavors. As expressed in this coriander broth with beans, greens and chili crisp that comes together in no time.
Briljante Bonen by Bloeme Burema
Very often the cookbooks of professional cooks skew towards the cheffy, making them hard to use as a homecook who just wants to get something edible on the table for a tasty weeknight meal. Either because the technique, time, ingredients or the resulting amount of food are just not doable at home.
Not so with Bloeme’s Briljante Bonen. Portions skew 2-4, loads of alternatives are given if you can’t find the ‘right’ ingredient and every recipe states whether you can use pre-cooked beans or need to cook them from scratch (a rarity). In the intro, she also explains why in some cases from scratch is better, as well as the different cooking times, the difference between beans from a tin or a jar and anything else relevant to cooking with beans. Without all that information becoming overwhelming.
Because I’m trying to prep at least a beany-side to last me most of the week, Bloeme’s book came at the perfect time for me. Besides the coriander broth with beans, greens and chili crisp that I’m sharing today, there is so much I want to cook from this. Smokey butterbeans, marinated butterbeans, butterbean gratin, gochujang butter bean toast, and those aren’t even all of the butterbean recipes. Let alone all of the recipes from the book I want to cook! I’ve already made the ‘vacation’ salad with cannellini beans and red pepper dressing with garlic toast and it’s been a very good week for lunches for me.
Of the 24 recipes I’ve earmarked to make at some point in my life, only 5 include meat or fish and even then Bloeme usually offers something to substitute that component with. Which makes this book perfect for vegetarians and vegans as well. Unfortunately for now this book is only available in Dutch.
Quick coriander broth with beans, greens and chili crisp
In Bloeme’s book, this recipe is made with black eyed peas and bok choy. Unfortunately in this part of rural France these aren’t the easiest to come by, so for a color pop and some greens I went with black beans and nappa cabbage. The result was still stellar and it comes together in no time. You will need a (stick) blender and some good sieves for this.
Unfortunately if you don’t enjoy cilantro I can’t help you there. But I think as far as the beans and greens go this is pretty much a many things go territory. I can imagine butter beans would work wonders here, for example, as would kidney beans. The bok choy can be replaced with nappa cabbage like I did, or with Swiss chard, mustard greens or kale for example. Though you may want to adjust your cooking times a little.
Bloeme does offer a recipe for chili crisp in her book, but you can easily use a store-bought version. I’m still kneedeep in Trouble&Spice chili crisps and used Numb Numb, her Sichuan pepper heavy collab with Flying Sauces for this. It worked a treat. You can still use my discount code DorothyPorker to get 10% off Nic’s chili crisps.
Coriander broth with beans, greens and chili crisp
Equipment
- 1 Large pot with a thick bottom
- 1 large pot or bowl
- (stick) blender
- 2 Sieve ideally two, with one being super fine
Ingredients
- 4 C - 1 l water
- 1 T salt
- 1 bunch coriander about 80 g - coarsely chopped
- 14 oz - 400 g spinach frozen or fresh
- 5 cloves garlic finely chopped or grated
- 1.4 oz - 40 g ginger grated
- salt and pepper to taste
- lemon juice to taste, see notes
- 2 C - 500 g black eyed peas from a tin or jar, rinsed
- 2 bok choy white part cut into half moons, leaves coarsely chopped
Instructions
- Bring 4 C - 1 l of water to the boil with 1 t salt.
- Once the water has come to the boil add the coriander, spinach, garlic and ginger and allow to cook gently for 2 minutes.
- Pour everything into your blender or use a stick blender to blend the mixture to a smooth consistency.
- Pour the mixture through a sieve into a second pot or bowl. You may need to spoon the mixture round to get all of the liquids out. Then pour the liquid through (ideally an even finer) sieve into the pot you started in. Be sure to press out as much of the liquid as you can.
- Taste and adjust the flavor with salt and pepper and lemon juice (see notes). Add the beans and gently heat the beans in the broth before adding the chopped bok choy whites and cook for another 2 minutes.
- Add the coarsely chopped bok choy leaves and allow to wilt.
- Serve immediately and add chili oil to taste.
Notes
- I would say with some good bread this would serve 2 as a main, or 4 as a starter.
- I halved this recipe, which also worked out fine.
- If you make this recipe ahead of time, don't add the lemon juice until you're ready to serve as it will discolor the broth and it won't look as nice. Without the lemon juice the broth will keep it's gorgeous shade of green for about 2 days.
- Don't be like me and rinse your blender immediately, or you will have a hard time getting all those tiny specs of coriander and spinach out.
- If you're cooking beans from scratch, you will need about 200 g - 0.45 oz of dried beans. While Bloeme does give a method for cooking beans from scratch, there are so many roads to Rome I suggest you Google or use your preferred method for doing this.
- Bloeme uses black eyed peas, I used black beans, but you can probably make this with any bean that tickles your fancy.
- Bloeme uses bok choy, I used nappa cabbage, you can also use Swiss chard or kale (though you may want to adjust cooking times for those).
