What We’re Cooking This Week: White Bean Salad with Arugula, Celery and Mint

Wellspent Market founder Jim Dixon has been writing about food and restaurants for Willamette Week for a long time. He wants our readers to eat well, and he shows them how with the recipes he creates just for us by using simple cooking techniques and easy-to-find ingredients.

Reader, you may be shocked to learn that I’ve never looked at a TikTok video. So imagine my surprise when I, a lover of all things bean-related and a self-proclaimed member of what Rancho Gordo founder Steve Sando calls the leguminati, only recently learned about the hot new trend called the Dense Bean Salad (aka DBS and, from what I can tell, so important that it’s always capitalized).

For those of you also in the dark, the DBS frenzy started with a viral video from Violet Witchel, a so-called influencer who, after a celiac diagnosis, started cooking her own meals to be certain she wasn’t getting any gluten. A couple of years ago she made a blend of canned beans, a bunch of vegetables, some form of protein, tossed it with a flavorful dressing, and called it a dense bean salad.

While I’m tempted to dismiss DBS as another short-lived trend, I’ve been trying to get people to eat more beans for years. But I do have a couple of gripes. Witchel’s recipes use canned beans, and while they’re an easy shortcut, dried beans cooked with just water and salt have much more flavor. As I’ve often pointed out, canned beans need to be rinsed of the liquid they’re packed in, but when you cook dried beans the broth is delicious.

My other complaint is trivial. The recipes I’ve found (many have been republished so I’ve still been able to avoid TikTok) produce a dish just like any other bean salad, there’s nothing particularly dense about them. People have been eating bean salads for millennia, using favas, cowpeas, and chickpeas before the Columbian introduction of Phaseolus vulgaris, the New World beans like pintos, kidneys, and cannellini.

Anyway, that’s enough old man ranting. Just make some bean salad and call it whatever you want.

Recipe

2 cups cooked white beans*

2 cups loosely packed arugula, coarsely chopped

2-3 stalks celery, thinly sliced* and preferably with leaves

1 cup loosely packed mint leaves, coarsely chopped

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

Kosher-style sea salt to taste

*I used cannellini beans, but almost any white bean works, even the big fat corona beans. Cook them using my basic beans recipe. If your beans are really brothy, use a slotted spoon to lift them out of the liquid. I prefer to keep the pot at a very low simmer until the broth has been reduced. The best produce departments sell cut celery, and I always pick through and take the lighter colored inner stalks with lots of leaves, but if you can’t get them any celery stalks will do.

Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl. Taste and add salt or vinegar as needed. Best at room temperature.