Cooking Methods
Although there are many variations to this popular dish, it usually consists of Greek fasolia gigandes (giant white beans), tomatoes, onions, olive oil, parsley, and sugar. When fasolia gigandes cannot be obtained, large lima beans are suitable substitutes. Other vegetables such as garlic, carrots, and celery are sometimes used, and some recipes even use sausages.
As with many beans, the fasolia gigandes must be soaked overnight in plenty of cold water. Then the beans are boiled until tender and the rest of ingredients are added. The cooking method for the gigandes plaki is to sauté all of the ingredients for 20 minutes. Then the beans are baked in the oven until the top layer of the dish is slightly charred from the sugar reacting to the heat. The beans are garnished with parsley and Greek feta, then served with Greek bread alongside this dish.
Read more about this topic: Gigandes Plaki
Famous quotes containing the words cooking and/or methods:
“Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateurs work.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (18601935)
“A writer who writes, I am alone ... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.”
—Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907)