Clean recipe · inspiredtaste.net

Ridiculously Easy Bean Salad

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Ingredients

Beans: In our photos, we’ve used three types of beans: chickpeas, pinto beans, and black beans. For a traditional 3 bean salad, use chickpeas, kidney beans, and canned or blanched green beans. Or make it a 5 bean salad and use chickpeas, pinto beans, kidney beans, black beans, and canned or blanched green beans.
Onion: We love sweet onion for this salad since it adds crunch but doesn’t overpower the salad with onion flavor.
Cucumber: You really want some crunch to balance the softer texture of the beans. We love cucumber, but celery, fennel, jicama, and bell peppers are all excellent crunchy veggies that work in this salad.
Capers: Our favorite ingredient in this bean salad is capers, which add little salty notes throughout. We love them!
Fresh herbs: Look at pretty much any salad recipe on Inspired Taste, and you’ll see us adding fresh herbs. We love fresh parsley in this salad, but other herbs will work, too. Try basil, mint, tarragon, dill and cilantro. When adding tarragon, add to taste since it is more flavorful than other fine herbs.
Our Favorite Bean Salad Dressing: We love keeping the flavors in this salad light, so our dressing only requires a quick whisk of red wine vinegar, olive oil, mustard, salt, pepper, and dried oregano (Italian seasoning or Herbes de Provence would work nicely, too). We use a similar dressing to make our favorite pasta salad.

1Add chopped onions to a small bowl and cover with cold water. Set aside for 5 minutes, drain, and then rinse. This step helps to remove some of the “raw” flavor of the onion so that it does not overpower the salad.
2Meanwhile, in the bottom of a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar, olive oil, mustard, salt and pepper. Taste the dressing and then adjust with more salt/pepper. If the dressing tastes too abrasive, whisk in 1 to 2 teaspoons of honey or maple syrup to balance out the vinegar.
3Add the beans, drained onion, cucumber, parsley, capers and dried oregano. Toss well, cover and chill in the refrigerator at least 1 hour to allow the beans to marinate in the dressing.
4The salad will keep stored in an airtight container in the fridge up to 4 days.