White beans make soups in winter, but in summer, they splash around with vinaigrettes, shrimp, pastas, tomatoes, grilled vegetables, fresh herbs and endless other ingredients to make salads, al fresco lunches and dinners, picnic portables, spreadable dips, summery side dishes and meatless main courses. They are the designer food of the season - always classic in style, never loud or overstated. Now is the time to simmer up a large pot of cooked white beans - then freeze them in batches for summer use. Both look the part, but one has a texture, feeling, and natural freshness that can't be replaced. Cooking a batch of white beans from scratch is easy, and the results make it overwhelmingly worthwhile.
White beans are sweet.
They have a natural sweetness to them that other beans can't quite emulate, and this is what I believe is their best asset. They adapt well to pastas and salads, being neither too large nor too small. Navy beans are about the size of a pea, and they're usually the beans used for making traditional baked beans. If you prefer a smaller sized bean in your ingredients, use a navy bean. The off-white or ecru colored garbanzos, as I have mentioned, are entirely different in shape and taste, but they are so well suited to summer dishes, I recommend cooking up a batch of them as well.