*Diane loves green beans so much that I have to make them at least every other week. If I don't, she starts poking around in the kitchen while I'm cooking dinner, asking if we're going to have them any time soon.
The kids won't touch them; they're green. It's just not happening. My dad picked beans for a summer job when he was a boy, and they're his favorite vegetable. My two brothers can't stand them. I was talking with Pat last weekend, and he said:
"I finally subscribed to your blog by email, and what's the first one I get? Green beans! Why did I bother?"
Trust me when I say this is a good recipe. As I said above, I've made it every two weeks for the last eight years. It uses a steam/saute technique I learned from Pam Anderson's How to Cook without a Book. In fact, Pam put this exact technique on her blog a couple of weeks ago, right after I took the pictures for this post. You can check out the original recipe here: Simple Steam-Sauteed Green Beans.
Recipe: Steam-Sauteed Green Beans
Equipment:
- Wide saucepan or fry pan with a lid
Ingredients:
- 1 pound green beans, stem ends trimmed
- 2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
- ½ cup water
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- ½ teaspoon ground pepper
- 1 tablespoon butter (optional, but pretty plain without it)
- 1 lemon, zested then halved (optional)
1. Steam the Green Beans: Put the beans in the pan. Add the garlic, ½ cup water, ½ teaspoon kosher salt, ½ teaspoon ground pepper, and 1 tablespoon butter. Cover the pan, and put over medium-high heat. Wait for the water to come to a boil, then cook, covered, for 8 minutes.
2. Saute the Green Beans: Remove the lid, and cook, stirring the beans occasionally. Keep cooking until all the remaining water boils off and the beans are tender, and just starting to brown, another 2-3 minutes.
*You should be left with just the butter in the pan, and you'll know you're there when you hear the beans start to sizzle. I test for doneness by biting into a bean; it should have just a hint of crunch to it.
3. Season the beans: Squeeze the lemon over the beans and stir to combine. Pour the beans, butter and lemon juice onto a serving platter. Sprinkle with the lemon zest and serve.
Variations:
*I'm in a real hurry: Skip the garlic and lemon - just use beans, salt, pepper and butter.
*I want to be really healthy: Cut the butter back to 1 teaspoon. I wouldn't eliminate it entirely. Even a little butter adds a big hit of flavor to the beans.
*Olive Oil: Substitute olive oil (or any other vegetable oil) for the butter, or do half butter, half oil.
*Asian: Add 2 cloves of minced garlic with the green beans, substitute ¼ cup soy sauce for half the water, and substitute 2 teaspoon vegetable oil and 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil for the butter.
*Orange beans: Substitute half an orange and its zest for the lemon.
*Trimming green beans: I grab a handful, line them all up with the stem side facing in the same direction, then push the bunch of beans up against my knife to get the stems in a line. This makes it easy for me to chop the stems off a lot of beans in one slice.
*Part of why I'm showing you this recipe just before Christmas is: I'm making a big batch of beans for Christmas dinner. I double the recipe, and steam-saute them in my dutch oven, then follow the make-ahead instructions, below.
*To Make ahead: Only add the beans, water and salt, and finish through step 1. Drain the beans and refrigerate them up to two days. (I put them in a ziploc bag in the refrigerator). 15 minutes before you're ready to serve them, heat the tablespoon of butter in a fry pan over medium high heat until the butter stops foaming. Add the beans, and saute for a couple of minutes, stirring often, until the beans are heated through and starting to brown. Add the garlic and cook for a minute or two, or until you just start to smell the garlic. Add pepper, taste to see if you need to add a little more salt, squeeze the juice of half a lemon over them, and serve.
What do you think? Questions? Other ideas? Leave them in the comments section below.
Related Posts:
Sauteed Swiss Chard
Guest Post on Black Iron Dude: Grilled Green Beans
Barbecued Frozen Corn
Grilled Green Beans Recipe
Inspired by:
Simple Steam-Sauteed Green Beans [threemanycooks.com]
Pam Anderson: How to Cook Without a Book
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Sigrid
How about a pressure cooker version of this green bean recipe Mike?
I’d love to participate in another offering of the class you did for work colleagues, Mike and I bet there are other readers of your bold who would as well.
Mike Vrobel
Just going to leave this here: https://www.dadcooksdinner.com/pressure-cooker-green-beans/
Trombley Sigrid
Not like green beans? Isn’t that in-American? Just kidding but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like green beans. I want to try this recipe soon. Using orange with the green beans - I like that idea.
Mike V @ DadCooksDinner
This is one of my go-to recipes - I make it a couple of times a month. I'm glad it worked so well for you.
Chris Lukowski
After making them the other night I can see why. This was amazingly easy and the beans came out perfect! A lot simpler than most "fresh bean" recipes I've seen that suggest boiling and shocking in ice water, and the texture was much more preferable than the "squeaky" frozen beans heated in the microwave.
PS- This recipe ended up being very instructive for a friend I had over. I made the beans using my MIL's cheap 12" frypan with an aluminum disc at the bottom. Any butter that ventured to the thin edges past the disc of the pan burnt quickly while any in the center was fine. "This," I said, "is why you want to avoid cheap pans like this like the plague. You don't need All-Clad, even a solid Calphalon will do better than this garbage." That was a fun moment.
Mike V @ DadCooksDinner
No, I haven't. Sorry...
Chris Lukowski
Just curious, have you ever applied this technique to frozen green beans?
MikeV @ DadCooksDinner
@Maggy
Thank you!
Maggy
I was about to comment on the All-Clad pan piece. I kept scrolling and then there was this piece on steam-sauteed green beans!
I'd say you've nailed this technique, Mike.
And thanks for clearing up the All-Clad mystery. I've never been a fan of those pans, but I think it's because my heat's too high.
Great chicken shot!
MikeV @ DadCooksDinner
@Anonymous:
I can't believe I forgot the garlic! Thank you for pointing that out; I'll update the recipe ASAP.
It should go in the pot in step 1, with the green beans and everything else.
If I'm making it ahead, I don't add the garlic until I'm reheating the green beans; then I add it right at the end, and cook until I just start to smell garlic.
Anonymous
What about the garlic? In particular, when do you add the garlic if you're doing this ahead of time?
MikeV @ DadCooksDinner
@AYOTG:
The "hint of crisp" seems to be a generational thing. My mom thinks the beans are underdone at that point, and Pam Anderson wrote about this in her post on the recipe - her mom thinks the same thing.
(My dad is thrilled to have green beans, so he's fine with it.)
A Year on the Grill
just a hint of crisp is dead on. I used to eat out a lot. I could tell the quality of a chef by his vegetables. Needed to be crisp yet fully cooked, and not over wilted cooked.
Any cook can grill a steak... it takes a chef to make beans right