butter bean with pomegranate tapenade

Butter beans with Zejd’s pomegranate tapenade uses store cupboard ingredients for a warming dish on a chilly day. Finding a jar of butter beans and a tin of tomatoes hidden away in the back of the cupboard is always a relief, but you may be wondering how to add in the flavour. If you’ve missed the slow cooking window, Zejd’s pomegranate tapenade is the answer!

It’s a celebration of Lebanese ingredients: crushed black souri olives, capers, Zejd’s pomegranate molasses, rosemary, thyme and mint all blended together with olive oil and a little red wine vinegar. In his Kitchen Diaries II, Nigel Slater champions the ever useful butter beans using a touch of treacle and mustard to create layers of flavour. We preferred the saltiness of the olives and capers, the depth of the pomegranate molasses and the freshness of the mint – in short, a more Mediterranean addition to the butter beans. 

We based our recipe on Nigel Slater’s Butter Bean with mustard and tomato from Kitchen Diaries II. But the fun of a recipe is to make it your own. Use a different variety of bean – cannellini would work well. If you’re making this in the summer, with an abundance of fresh tomatoes, choose them over tinned tomatoes. We used a Romano pepper as it was left over from a veg box, but it would work equally well without.  

serves 2