Greek cooking has relied on legumes for as long as it has relied on olive oil. Beans, lentils, chickpeas, and fava are not a side note in the Greek kitchen: they are the base of the weekly table, simmered with tomato and oil, or dressed with lemon, onion, and herbs. This collection brings together the pulses we source from Greek growers, from PGI Gigantes beans of Prespes and Kastoria to Farsala lentils, split fava and peeled chickpeas. All of them travel from Greece to your kitchen.

What Greek legumes are

Ask a Greek what the national dish is, and a fair number will answer fasolada, a white bean soup with olive oil, carrot, and tomato. Legumes carry that weight in Greek food culture. Gigantes plaki, the large white beans baked in tomato sauce, is the dish that comes out of the oven at Sunday lunch. Revithada, the chickpea stew of Sifnos, was traditionally left overnight in the village baker's oven and eaten the next day. Fava, the yellow split pea puree of the Aegean, is served warm with raw onion and a thread of olive oil.

There is a practical reason behind all of this. The Orthodox calendar has a long list of meatless days, and Greek cooks built an entire repertoire of satisfying, protein-rich dishes around pulses. That repertoire is now one of the pillars of the Mediterranean diet: a plant-based source of protein and fibre, eaten regularly rather than occasionally, and cooked with olive oil rather than despite it.

Two ways Greece eats legumes

Dried legumes for slow cooking

This is the traditional pantry: beans, lentils, chickpeas, and split fava, dried and stored. They ask for an overnight soak and an unhurried simmer, and they give back a depth of flavour that no shortcut reproduces. The gigantes we carry are PGI beans from Prespes and Kastoria in northern Greece, where the cold nights and the altitude give a thin skin and a floury interior. The lentils and the fava come from Farsala, in Thessaly. We also carry an organic line and a mixed legume and buckwheat blend for one-pot cooking.

Ready-to-eat legumes

The second way is newer in the shops and older in the logic: legumes already cooked, ready to be warmed or eaten as they are. In Greece, these come either as a finished dish, gigantes in tomato sauce or revithada, steam-cooked and sealed, or as plain steamed pulses with nothing added, used cold in salads and grain bowls. They do the same job as the dried pantry on the days when there is no time to plan a meal, and they keep the routine going through a working week.

How to cook Greek dried legumes

Soak the beans and the chickpeas in cold water overnight, then drain and rinse before cooking. Lentils and split fava need no soaking. Salt goes in towards the end, not at the start, or the skins stay tough. Gigantes are usually parboiled until just tender, then finished in the oven with tomato, onion, olive oil, and parsley until the sauce thickens. Fava is simmered with onion until it collapses into a puree and is served warm, with raw onion, lemon, and olive oil on top. Chickpeas take the longest and reward the most: a slow oven, a lemon, a bay leaf.

Frequently asked questions about Greek legumes.