The dense bean salad does it all

(Originally published October 2024)

Off the top of my head, I can think of only a few things that have affected me as deeply as this discovery.

It’s not as profound as the secret of the universe or the meaning of life. But it’s close.

It’s the dense bean salad.

While this simple dish gained fame on TikTok, which I use mostly for the gardening tips and clumsy cat videos, I learned about it from legacy media. They got it from TikTok. (They pretend to do hard-hitting reporting, but in truth they waste hours watching drag makeup tutorials and deep-cleaning videos like the rest of us.)

“I soon learned it’s the salads, not the beans, that are dense, presumably because they don’t contain lettuce.”

The mystery of “dense beans” is what got my attention. But I soon learned it’s the salads, not the beans, that are dense, presumably because they don’t contain lettuce. They serve as a hearty meal in themselves.

To make a dense bean salad, you start with two cans of your bean of choice, add a selection of vegetables and optional protein, and toss it all in a dressing, usually a vinaigrette. A big batch lasts all week.

It’s hardly a new concept. Since the advent of pease porridge cold, people have been mixing their legumes with whatever they had on hand and eating the resulting dish for—if the nursery rhyme is accurate—up to nine days.

But a content creator (and genius) named Violet Witchel has managed to frame the dense bean salad as a novel life hack. And her 2.6 million followers (even those of us who wouldn’t touch pease porridge at any temperature) can’t get enough.

The dense bean salad is nutritious and cheap and loaded with fiber, color, and flavor. When you eat it in the office, your coworkers eye you with admiration tinged with contempt, thinking, “Look at her all healthy and making yummy noises like she’s so special.”

At first, I doubted the wisdom of making up a large bowl in advance. I worried that the dressing would turn the ingredients to mush in a few hours. But Witchel calls this “marinating” and says the salad gets better with each passing day.

Works for me.

Maybe I love the dense bean salad because it has come into my life at just the right time, when I’ve returned to the office on a hybrid schedule. I forgot what a production packing a lunch used to be.

Making a salad, for instance, involved washing, peeling and cutting four—sometimes five!—different vegetables. It’s just too much on a Tuesday morning.

And bringing leftovers means pulling together all kinds of elements for a halfway balanced meal. Plus the office microwave is several miles from my desk; I have to pack a snack to make sure I can get there and back without fainting from exhaustion.

Friends say I should I just buy lunch in town. Two times a week? What am I, a Kardashian?

The dense bean salad is convenience in a single bowl. No reheating is necessary. And every version I’ve tried so far has been tastier than the last.

The first time, I mixed cannellini beans with cherry tomatoes, red bell peppers, artichoke hearts, and parsley. I threw in some leftover salmon and sautéed kale that would otherwise have decomposed in the back of the fridge. Delicious.

For the next, I tried different vegetables with mozzarella cheese and basil pesto. Other than giving me paint-peeling garlic breath, it was a winner.

The third was caramelized roasted vegetables and white northern beans. This one was especially exciting because the dressing, in addition to calling for minced shallot (so fancy), required za’atar.

I’m of Welsh and Italian descent; I had never heard of za’atar. It sounded like a weight-loss drug or the home planet of a Marvel superhero, neither of which made sense in the context of a vinaigrette.

I now know that za’atar is a spice blend from the Middle East. So not only is the dense bean salad saving me time and feeding me well, but it’s educating me. Is there anything it can’t do?

If you’ve somehow missed this craze and are curious about it, google “dense bean salad recipes.” You could look for them on TikTok too, but I don’t advise it. Before you know it, you’ll be watching your 15th clumsy cat video and running 20 minutes late for work.

At least, I’ve heard that can happen.