I served last night for Valentine’s Day.
White Bean Bruschetta Spread
- 1 15-ounce can cannellini beans
- 1 head of garlic
- 1 teaspoon dried rosemary
- extra virgin olive oil
- freshly cracked pepper
- salt
- Start with roasting the garlic. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. (Hopefully you’re roasting something else as well so you don’t have the oven on for one measly head of garlic ;). Slice the top off the garlic, so that the tops of the cloves are exposed. Place in a square of aluminum foil large enough so that the whole head can be wrapped up. Drizzle some olive oil over the garlic and top with the rosemary. Fold the foil over the top, so that the garlic is completely wrapped. Roast in the oven for about an hour. The cloves should be a golden brown color.
- Once the garlic is ready, rinse and mash the beans. Add a pinch of salt, a few cranks of pepper, and a couple glugs of olive oil. Squeeze the roasted garlic into the beans, and continue to mash until mixture is smooth. Adjust salt and pepper as needed. That’s it; there’s your spread.
Some people might like to cook their own beans. Other people (maybe the same people) would run the spread through a food processor. And that would work. I just didn’t feel like cleaning the food processor. My other thought is that you don’t need to use this as a topping for anything. You could just serve it as “Mashed White Beans.” I guess the point I’m getting at is: Enjoy as you see fit.
Now, for those of you wondering about the bread: We made bread based off of this recipe (minus all the extra flavors), which is in fact a riff on this recipe. We altered the recipe a bit based on the flours we had and made a loaf instead of rolls. It’s certainly a good starting point for a bread recipe.
To make the bruschetta: Broil bread slices for about 5 minutes. Top with the white bean spread. (Normally this is the point where you rub the bread with garlic, but considering the amount of garlic in the spread that seemed silly.) Then add chopped olives and/or sun-dried tomatoes.
Oooh, Tim will love this! We really love garlic. Funny, isn’t it, that all of us raised by a certain garlic-free Debbi love garlic so much? ;) And it’ll be fun to have a new thing to try on top of all this bread I’ve been baking.
Hey I measure stuff in glugs, too! But not yogurt and sour cream. I measure those in glumps. (Of course).
Teehee @ glumps.
This was terrific, my favorite… sun dried tomato and olive combo!
Glad you liked it!
I just made this tonight!
It turned out great. We doubled the garlic, and I think I even could have added more and been happy. I put the garlic in the oven with the HOMEMADE bread I was baking for the bruschetta. Can you tell I’m proud? The garlic was so cute with their heads cut off! Tim will probably put pictures on the blog soon.
That is a lot of garlic. Hehe. I bet the homemade bread was awesome. Way to go Kathy!