Pantry: The right way to cook home-grown green beans

Do you look forward to green bean season? I do, although it took me a while to recover from the canned green beans of my youth. I think it was haricots verts, those tiny green beans about the size of pencil lead, and the late Nancy Skall’s Spanish Musica green beans that converted me. Now I enjoy them from the first beans of late spring to the last of fall’s crop.

These days, we can find several types of pole beans and bush beans at our farmers markets. There are the long flat Romano beans, also known as Italian beans; Kentucky Wonder wax beans, which are yellow; Blue Lake beans, the most familiar and commonly known as string beans; Royal Burgundy beans that are deep purple, almost black, when raw but green when cooked; Asian long beans, which are typically at least 2 feet long and often longer; and tiny haricots verts, which grow so quickly they need to be picked two or three times a day at the peak of the season.

Green beans are delicious prepared simply, provided they are cooked long enough. Undercooked green beans were one of Julia Child’s pet peeves and I agree with her. Raw or undercooked green beans can be bitter and rather disgusting. But if you cook them long enough, so that there is just a tiny bit of resistance when you bite into one, they don’t need much more than that. A little butter maybe or a splash of extra-virgin olive oil and some flake salt will add a lovely dimension, but with good beans even these simple seasonings are not essential. For example, Libby Batzel of Beet Generation Farm grills long beans at the farmers markets she attends and they are absolutely delicious with nothing more than the bit of char left by the grill. They are even better with some coarse salt and a spritz of lemon.

You can, of course, dress up beans in all manner of ways and add them to a huge array of dishes, from potato salad and succotash to minestrone, soupe au pistou, pastas and rice dishes. For bean recipes from the “Seasonal Pantry” archives, visit “Eat This Now” at pantry.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.

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Green beans, cherry tomatoes and basil are seasonal companions and perfect mates on the plate, too.

Green Beans with Warm Cherry Tomato Vinaigrette

Serves 3 to 4

- Kosher salt

1 pound Blue Lake green beans, stem ends trimmed away

1 small shallot, minced

2 garlic cloves minced

1 tablespoon Champagne or white wine vinegar

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice, plus more to taste

6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 cups quartered cherry tomatoes

- Black pepper in a mill

- Several basil leaves, cut into very thin strips

Fill a large saucepan with water, add a generous 2 tablespoons or so of salt and bring to a boil over high heat. When the water reaches a rolling boil, add the green beans and cook for 4 minutes. Taste a bean for doneness; your teeth should go through it with just a bit of resistance. If the bean is still hard, cook 1 minutes more. Drain and transfer to a wide, shallow serving bowl.

While waiting for the water to boil, put the shallot and garlic into a small bowl, season with salt, add the vinegar and lemon juice and set aside.

Pour about 2 tablespoons of the olive oil into a sauté pan set over medium-high heat, add the tomatoes and cook for about 2 minutes, tossing gently, until heated through. Season with salt and add the shallot mixture. Swirl, add the remaining olive oil and heat through. Remove from the heat, add several turns of black pepper, taste and correct for salt and acid balance. Pour the vinaigrette over the beans, top with basil leaves and enjoy right away.

Variations

Add about ? cup lightly toasted slivered almonds along with the basil.

Fry 3 or 4 strips of bacon until very crisp. Drain the bacon and either chop or crumble it. Drain off all but 2 tablespoons of the bacon fat, sauté the tomatoes and continue as directed, using just 4 tablespoons of olive oil. Add the crumbled bacon along with the basil.

Cook 1 pound of sliced new potatoes until just tender and toss them with the beans. Drizzle with about 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and the juice of ½ lemon and continue as directed in the main recipe.

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I love revisiting this recipe, from the remarkable “Zuni Cafe Cookbook” by the late Judy Rodgers (Norton, 2003), at least once each year. It is so counter-intuitive, shocking, really, to our modern sensibilities that have been conditioned to expect “al dente” when it comes to most vegetables. But if you follow Rodgers’ instructions, you’ll have an extraordinary dish with layers of flavor and a voluptuous texture. Although you can make this with any fresh bean, it is best with Romano beans and that is what I recommend you use. I think this is delicious enough to be a main course, with maybe a sliced tomato and burrata salad to start and a perfect white peach to finish. It is also excellent with roasted chicken.

Zuni Cafe’s Long-Cooked Romano Beans

Serves 4

2 pounds fresh Romano beans

1/4 cup mild olive oil

- Kosher salt

- A few pinches of chili flakes, to taste

2-4 garlic cloves, lightly crushed

Break or snip the stem ends off the beans. Unless they are badly shriveled, leave the tail ends intact. Place in a 6-quart Dutch oven or crowd in a 4-quart saucepan. Drizzle and fold in olive oil to coat all the beans generously, using your hands to sprinkle with salt and chili flakes as you go. Drop the garlic cloves on top, cover and place over very low heat. You should barely hear a faint sizzle. Stir a few times during the first 30 minutes, to make sure the beans on the bottom don’t scorch, covering the pot again quickly each time so the little steam the beans produce doesn’t evaporate. (Don’t add water;the flavor and texture will suffer if you do.)

Once the beans begin to soften, usually after about 45 minutes, stir again. Taste for salt. Once they have started to soften, you should notice the oil pooling shallowly on the bottom of the pot. Now check on the beans every 30 minutes or so, but stir only once more, and gently, to avoid crushing the beans. Cook until the beans are utterly tender and limp and have a rich, concentrated flavor, usually about 2 hours total cooking time.

Waiting for this degree of doneness will require a leap of faith for anyone trained to favor al dente vegetables. The beans at the bottom of the pot may color a little during the last 30 minutes before the whole pot is ready, but they will still be delicious.

Serve right away.

Michele Anna Jordan has written 24 books to date, including the new “Good Cook’s” series. Email Jordan at michele@saladdresser.com. You’ll find her blog, “Eat This Now,” at pantry.blogs.pressdemocrat.com