Brown Butter White Bean Purée

brown butter white bean puree underneath a pork chop with shredded brussels sprouts

5 from 3 votes

Brown Butter White Bean Purée

Brown butter white bean purée makes a nice bed for a wide variety of meals. Made with beans cooked scratch and homemade stock, the flavors will be robust and mind-blowing. It's also great with canned beans and good-quality broth from a box.

Prep Time5

Cook Time10

Total Time15

Course: Sides

Cuisine: American

Keyword: white bean puree

Calories: 319kcal

Author: Carolyn Gratzer Cope

Ingredients

2 tablespoons (30 ml) extra-virgin olive oil
1 shallot minced (about ½ cup)
4 large garlic cloves minced
3 sprigs fresh thyme
3 ½ cups cooked white beans see note 1 below
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
¾ cup (175 ml) vegetable or chicken broth
2 tablespoons (30 ml) freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tablespoons (28 grams) good salted, cultured butter (such as Kerrygold)
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

Heat olive oil over medium heat in a medium pot.
Add shallot, garlic, thyme, and salt and cook, stirring occasionally, for about two minutes.
Stir in beans and broth. Simmer briskly for 5 minutes.
Remove thyme sprigs and puree with an immersion blender (or in a regular blender) until perfectly smooth.
Stir in lemon juice.
In a small skillet over medium heat, melt butter and then cook until foaming subsides and butter solids turn brown at bottom of pan. Swirling the pan gently can help you see what’s going on under there.
When butter is golden brown and smells spectacularly nutty, remove pan from heat.
Stir brown butter into bean purée and serve. It will thicken up a bit as it cools.

Notes

This recipe starts with cooked white beans. You can use any kind, from cannellini to great northern to navy. The 3 ½ cups called for in the recipe equals two cans, or one heaping cup of dry beans after cooking. Here's how to cook beans from dry.
You can use vegetable broth to keep things vegetarian, or chicken broth. Imagine No Chicken lower sodium is my favorite vegetable broth by far — the flavor profile is clean and flexible and remarkably similar to chicken broth.
I much prefer to use fresh thyme sprigs when possible, but if you don't have them on hand, as I didn't when making the video, you can substitute ½ teaspoon dried thyme.
Use a really good-quality butter if you can. Here and virtually everywhere, I start with a cultured, salted butter from grass-fed cows. This sounds fancy but doesn't have to be. Kerrygold, for example, is sold in most supermarkets at a reasonable price.
The flavors of this dish go well with so many meals. I especially like to place a generous scoop of white bean purée into a shallow individual serving bowl and top it with pork chops (pictured), scallops, fish, or chicken.
The purée reheats beautifully, so feel free to make the whole recipe up to a week in advance and reheat in the microwave or on the stovetop right before serving. Treat leftovers the same way.

Nutrition