White Bean Dip, the Best Bean Dip for Dinner

Rich, flavorful, and highly scoopable, this White Bean Dip is an easy, healthy appetizer made with fiber-first and protein-rich cannellini or other white beans, olive oil, and garlic. Whether you’re looking for a creamy dip option for your crudités board, a healthy spread for toast and sandwiches, or just a simple "dip for dinner" on a weeknight, you can make it with ingredients you probably already have in your kitchen. Shall we?

Explore More

• Is White Bean Dip the Same as Hummus?
• What Ingredients You Need for White Bean Dip
• What Kind of White Beans Do You Use for Dip?
• Best Ideas for What to Do with White Bean Dip
• White Bean Dip with Garlic and Lemon Recipe

Is White Bean Dip the Same as Hummus?

Though the two dishes are both made with similar flavoring ingredients purèed beans, garlic, lemon, and olive oil, White Bean Dip and Hummus are not the same. Aside from the fact that White Bean Dip is made with white beans as the base, hummus is made with garbanzo beans aka chickpeas, and also includes tahini aka Middle Eastern or Mediterranean sesame paste.

To take it even further, this white bean dip technically isn't even a white bean hummus, either. The word "hummus" literally translates to chickpea or garbanzo bean, so the hummus dips we eat are made with chickpeas.

If a dip is made with a different kind of bean or legume without chickpeas, technically not hummus, just a dip. Edamame beans blended with garlic, citrus, and sesame and looks like a light green hummus? Not "Edamame Hummus." It's technically just Edamame Dip. (But I still call it hummus because it sounds better!!!)

Hummus flavored or mixed with other ingredients can still be hummus. Avocado blended into hummus? Avocado Hummus.

What Ingredients You Need for White Bean Dip

Fresh/Refrigerator Ingredients:

• garlic, 1 clove
• lemon juice and zest from 1 lemon
• fresh rosemary and/or parsley optional

Dry/Pantry Ingredients

• white beans, like cannellini or Great Northern, 1 can
• crushed ice cubes
• olive oil, ⅓ cup
• sea salt, ½ teaspoon plus more to taste
• black pepper optional

White beans are broad category of beans that are… you guessed it…white. There are different types of white beans, which vary in size, texture, taste and cooking time. The most common types of white beans are: Navy Beans, Great Northern Beans, Cannellini Beans & Lima Beans. They all hold up well in a soup, especially one that's blended; here are your options:

1. Cannellini Beans: Cannellini beans are a popular white bean native to Southern Italy. They are large and oval in size with a nutty flavor and a creamy texture, which makes them great for dips. Cannellini beans are also called white kidney beans.
2. Great Northern Beans: Great Northern Beans are medium-sized, medium-skinned beans that are slightly smaller than cannellini beans but larger than navy beans. They are light in flavor which means they generally take on the taste of the foods they’re being cooked with. They hold their shape better than navy beans which makes them better for soups or roasting. Best for: soups and stews in which beans hold their shape
3. Navy Beans: Navy beans are the smallest of various white beans, soft in texture, and mild flavor. They are not, as I mistakenly originally thought, navy blue, but pale ivory or white color. The beans are named for the US Navy, for whom the beans have been a staple food for over 200 years. They have various other names, including Boston beans, Yankee beans, haricots, or pea beans. Best for: thickening soups, puréed dips.
4. Lima Beans: Named for the capital city of Peru, lima beans are not white themselves, but varieties like baby lima beans are. Lima beans are called butter beans for their buttery, rich flavor, and starchy texture.

Pro Tips, Tricks, and Technique FAQs

• Double the Amount of White Bean Dip. This dip is SO GOOD, I highly recommend you make double the amount, eat what you want right away, and save the rest in the refrigerator for you to snack on for up to three (3) days.
• Roast Garlic. If you have the time to roast a head of garlic, which takes about 45 minutes, substitute out the fresh garlic clove and use half a head of roasted garlic in the dip, which will have a sweeter, mellower garlic flavor!
• Add Any Other Herbs. Parsley has a bright herbal flavor and rosemary has an association with fall, winter and the Holidays. You can sub or add basil, oregano, or any other herb you like!
• Cook Dried Beans from Scratch. If you have the time, 1-3 hours, you can cook dried white beans from scratch. Rinse the beans, pick out any debris and
  bad beans," add to a pot and cover with clean water by 2 inches, bring to a rolling boil for 15 minutes, reduce heat and simmer until beans are tender 1-3 hours, salting when the beans have begun to soften.

Best Recipes with Canned Beans

If you, like me, hoard canned beans like we're about to go into a pandemic lockdown for five years, but can't remember the last time you bought butter (probably back during Thanksgiving tbh) try these canned bean recipes to start using up your beans so you can replenish your pantry with a whole fresh new set of cans.

• Kale and White Bean Salad, Erewhon Recipe Dupe
• Kale and White Bean Soup, when your salad wants to be a soup
• Butternut Squash Black Bean Chili
• Deer Valley Turkey Chili, uses black beans

And yes, I love Olive Oil Cakes, why do you ask?

Best Ideas for What to Do with White Bean Dip

Look I don't make White Bean Dip in this house with any other intention than scooping it straight out of the food processor with whatever vegetable scraps I might have laying around. However, if you are little more civilized than that, here are some favorite ways to use White Bean Dip:

• Place in a bowl on a crudités platter
• Use in place of mayo as a creamy, garlicky, and protein-rich sandwich spread
• Dollop onto crisp grilled or toasted bread and top with sardines and a drizzle of balsamic reduction as a simple but sophisticated starter (especially great for Feast of the Seven Fishes!)
• Slather onto a plate with high sides or shallow bowl, add a can of tuna and fresh arugula, parsley or other crisp greens for a dip-salad

More Hummus and Bean-Based Dip Recipes and Ideas

• Classic Hummus and How to Get the Creamiest Restaurant-style
• Classic Hummus, made from scratch with dried garbanzo beans
• Hummus without Tahini
• Avocado Hummus
• Edamame Hummus
• Roasted Beet Hummus

Afterthoughts

Cannellini beans.

Imported tuna packed in olive oil.

Deep, dark green Tuscan kale sliced into plush, velvet ribbons.

Sounds like the beginning of a recipe, yes? ...

Long-simmered in a pot of homemade chicken stock with garlic, together they could be something warm and comforting and deliciously deep with flavor like this Kale and White Bean Soup.

Or this Kale and White Bean Salad.

Or...not.

No.

None of the above.

Greater than Some of the Parts

Oh, I ate all those things, cannellini beans, tuna, and kale, in the last few weeks. Just not all together as a single gourmet gorgeous glowing anti-aging deep delicious hearty, heart-warming dish.

I ate beans straight from the can for dinner one night.

I ate tuna for dinner another night. Pop lid. Fork. Straight from the jar.

I ate chopped raw kale for lunch. Not a kale salad, but chopped kale. Each piece plucked straight from the salad spinner with my fingers, sometimes dipped in a bowl of salt accidentally sitting on the counter.

I've also choked down a spoonful of cottage cheese for breakfast several mornings. On more than one lunch occasion, I've cut into a block of cold raw tofu still sitting in the soy-clouded water bath in its original peel-back plastic container with a fork like it was a piece of cake.

A square of dark chocolate? A handful of dried cherries? Half a bottle of red wine? Together they could have been components of a pretty intense cake.

Each one, in its individual entirety, however, has actually been a complete, though totally unbalanced, dinner.

How on earth could this be the recent dining history of a food blogger?!

It's not.

Because I am not a food blogger.

Blog of Beans

I finally figured this out today. Rather, I've finally admitted out-blog what I've known in the back of my mind for a very long-slash-short-slash-depends-on-your-universe-mine-is-internet time.

(So, i.e. "long time.")

I am not a food blogger. I may never have been a food blogger.

Or, you know, maybe I am a food blogger who just needs to get this train of thought back on its tracks.

Even as I am sitting here trying to write this very post, I am stopping mid-sentence. I am getting up to make myself lunch of last night's leftover under whatever straight out of the fridge, straight out of the styrofoam fliptop to-go box, cold, impaled with the only utensil within reach, a single disposable (but clean and unused?!) chopstick. I am coming to back to ride out my train of thought, but find myself now completely derailed.

So I start over.

And when I have five sentences on the screen five incredibly painful hours later, none of them go together.

At least not "together" in the way a half-educated, semi-literate sane adult person puts sentences together.

How It's Bean Going

My entire existence is this way right now. I don't know what it is. My own laziness? Short attention span prone to any and all distractions? Or is it something outside my control, like the speed of life? I can't write a complete sentence. I can't put together an entire dish. I can't even scratch a line all the way through an item on my to-do list. Oh, I can scratch part of it out. Like maybe the middle third of "CVS: toilet paper, floss picks, conditioner."

I stopped at the drugstore and only remembered to get floss picks?!

At one time, I blamed twitter, but I'm starting to believe that the short, Tourettes-like bursts of dissociated, disposable, unintelligible nonsense of twitter is not the cause, but a symptom of a larger, much deeper schizosocial problem of hyperactive information overload at warp-speed in every aspect of life.

I tried to slow it down and focus both my attention and energy a few times in the last few months. I soaked dried beans overnight. I simmered them for hours on the stovetop with garlic and sage. I had planned to turn actual pages of an actual, physical book while they cooked.

I ended up with 98 tabs open in firefox on my tablet, one of them three different opening sentences to a yet-to-be-completed post in wordpress.

And then I ate the beans straight from the pot with a ladle while finishing this post.