Cooking fresh green beans is a time consuming process but well worth the investment. My husband loves fresh green beans cooked until very tender with a bit of pork seasoning and sometimes it’s nice to have a few small bites of potatoes in the pot as well. If this is how you like your green beans then this information is for you. If you want crunchy restaurant style green beans then this guide is not for you.
Choosing Fresh Green Beans
Fresh green beans are good whether you get them from a local grocery, a farm stand or grown in your own garden. There are many varieties but I prefer Blue Lake and other varieties that don’t have strings. String beans have to be both broken and the strings removed which is a bit of a tedious process and many of those type of beans are far to stringy for my tastes. I don’t want to have to chew my green beans like celery.
Breaking and Snapping
Once you have some nice fresh beans you will want to wash them in some cold water and break off the ends, remove any bad spots and break them into pieces. They break up some when cooking so they don’t have to be broken up too small. I usually make two to three snaps per bean. Put your snapped clean green beans in a nice big pot and cover with water.
Cooking and Seasoning
Put them on the stove and start cooking. Add salt, pepper, and a bit of chopped onion. Green beans take a lot of salt to taste good. I always add more salt than I think they need and end up having to add more salt after I taste them once they start getting tender. So salt them generously.For two pounds of green beans I will start with 3 tablespoons of salt and one teaspoon of pepper but will likely add more once they cook a bit so I can test them by tasting.
Unless you want vegetarian beans, add the bacon grease from about 6 strips of bacon to the pot of beans while they cook. Cooking the beans with a piece of ham works even better for seasoning green beans. Ham is salty and cuts down on the amount of extra salt you would have to add and it gives them a lot of flavor. A small piece of a cottage ham or other boneless piece of ham is great to add to the pot of beans. You can leave the piece of ham whole or cut it into pieces. I have done it both ways and it makes no difference. I actually like chunks of ham mixed in the green beans but this is a matter of preference.
Green beans take about two hours to cook so start early and give them plenty of time. I often use a pressure cooker pot to reduce the cooking time. This works well and gets them tender in well under an hour if you are lucky enough to have one of these handy tools, If you aren’t using a pressure cooker cook the beans uncovered on medium heat until very tender and add more salt and pepper according to taste. They cook up a bit and you will need to make sure they don’t get dry by adding more water as needed.
Green Beans and Potatoes
If you want some potato bites in your green beans you have several choices. Many country cooks will simply wash some very small new potatoes and let them cook during the final 30 minutes or so of cooking. Ordinary potatoes can be pealed and cut into chunks and added to the beans and cooked until tender. If adding potatoes to your green beans you want to make sure not to add them until the beans are already cooked. Otherwise the potatoes will cook much faster than the green beans will and they can break all apart and lose their integrity.
Prior to serving I often add a few tablespoons of butter to my green beans. This is especially good when you have added potatoes to the beans as it seasons the potatoes perfectly. If I still have the bacon handy from the bacon grease I prepared earlier I break it up and scatter it on top of the dish of beans before serving.
Cooking fresh green beans is very easy and once you have cooked a pot of fresh green beans you may never want to eat canned green beans again.
