Butter Bean Stew

This spiced butter bean stew with kale and sweet potato is a rich and warming vegan stew. Tasty, filling and nutritious, this is serious vegan comfort food.

Jump to:

• 🍴Why You'll Love This Recipe
• 📝 What You'll Need
• 🥣 How To Make Butter Bean Stew
• 👩‍🍳 Top Tips
• 📋 Variations
• 📖 FAQs
• 🍲 More Tasty Comfort Food
• Butter Bean Stew with Kale and Sweet Potato

This butter bean stew is warming, filling and easy to make. A one-pot vegan stew that will keep you cosy and warm. Packed with butter beans and sweet potatoes this is a lovely nutritious, tasty stew that the whole family will love.

It's mildly spiced so the kids can enjoy it too. It's great for a quick and tasty weeknight dinner. Perfect on its own or you can add some home-cooked bread if you are particularly hungry.

🍴Why You'll Love This Recipe

• Great Weeknight Dinner - this is perfect for an easy but very tasty weeknight dinner! It's a one pot meal so light on the washing up too!
• Ready in under an hour! - you can have this on the table in under an hour!
• Perfect for the whole family - this stew is mildly spiced so it's suitable for all the family, you can up the heat if you like though.
• A very versatile stew - this is so easy to adapt, you can add more veggies or more beans if you want!

📝 What You'll Need

• Butter beans - also known as Lima beans. I use canned butter beans as they don't need to be cooked, saving some time. You can use dried beans if you want.
• Kale - curly kale of cavo nero works well for this. I prefer curly kale for this one though.
• Sweet potatoes - you just need a couple of sweet potatoes for this. I peel them first and roughly chop them.
• Vegetabes - you'll need one onion, garlic, a couple of large carrots, celery and 2 cans of chopped tomatoes.
• Herbs and spices - for herbs I add fresh thyme and dried bay leaves to this stew and some fresh parsley for serving. For the spices you'll need dried red chilli flakes, smoked paprika, ground cumin and ground cinnamon.
• Stock - I use a vegan vegetable bouilion to make the stock.

🥣 How To Make Butter Bean Stew

1. Start by cooking the onion and celery. Once they are translucent add the garlic and spices, these need to cook for just a minute. Next, add the sweet potato and carrots to the pan.

2. Now add the chopped tomatoes. I always add a little water to the empty cans, give it a swirl to catch any tomatoes or juices left in the can, then add that to the pan. About a quarter of a cup of water into each can should do the trick. Stir in the vegetable stock then add the thyme and bay leaves. You need to cover the pan now and leave it to simmer for about 20 minutes.

3. Check the sweet potatoes, they should be almost cooked now, if not give them another five minutes. If they are done add the beans and stir them into the stew.

4. Add the kale to the stew now, pop the lid back on for another 5 minutes. This will steam the kale and heat up those butter beans. After five minutes take off the lid and stir in the kale.

👩‍🍳 Top Tips

• Use a pan or pot with a tight-fitting lid. I use a stock pot to make this but you can use a dutch oven or a large saute pan too.
• Stir the stew often so that it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan or worse burn!
• Chop the sweet potatoes into roughly the same size. That way they will all cook at the same time, larger chunks will take longer to cook, smaller chunks will turn to mush if overcooked.
• Remove any woody stems from the kale, you want tender kale not tough woody bits in your stew.

📋 Variations

• Swap the kale for spinach - if you're not fond of kale then you can easily swap it for baby leaf spinach or spring greens if you like. If do you use spinach it will wilt a lot quicker than kale so adjust the timings with this in mind.
• Swap the sweet potatoes of waxy potatoes - if you want to you can easily use waxy potatoes or baby potatoes instead of sweet potatoes. You will need to adjust the cooking time if you do though.
• Don't like butter beans? cannellini beans, borlotti beans or kidney beans will work really well too. You coud mix and match the beans too if you like.

📖 FAQs

🍲 More Tasty Comfort Food

If like me you love a good stew, then you'll love my hearty Vegetable Stew, this is one of my favourite recipes and we have it a lot! Another favourite of ours is my Vegan Sausage Casserole with beans, this always goes done a treat! And if you fancy something with some Tex Mex flavours then you'll love my Vegetarian Enchilada Casserole.