Oven Roasted Green Beans Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Should I soak green beans before cooking? ›

Should I Soak Green Beans Before Cooking? Fresh green beans do not need to be soaked. To help tenderize the beans, blanch them in a large pot of salted water.

Add green beans to pan and sauté over medium heat for 2 minutes, stirring frequently. Add boiling water to pan and cover. Cook for about 15 minutes, just until beans are tender. Add vinegar, butter and salt and pepper and stir.

Like to steam my green beans to tenderness and toss them in a hot saute pan with olive oil, lots of chopped garlic, chili flakes, salt and pepper. Get the pan really hot, add the oil, garlic and chilis, cook them for seconds to release their flavor and then add the beans, tossing to combine.

If your green beans are tough after roasting it most likely means one of two things. Either the green beans you used were a bit too mature and tough (this method is best with slender green beans, especially haricots verts, or French green beans) or you didn't cook them long enough.

Your Beans Will Cook Faster

Well, creating an alkaline (or basic) environment by adding a small amount (about 1 teaspoon per cup of dry beans) of baking soda to your soaking/cooking water can actually help your beans cook faster.

"If you rinse your beans thoroughly, you will have a consistently flavored product, but if you do not rinse them, different amounts of salt will remain in the dish each time you cook it, and it will be hard to cook consistently," he says.

Nearly all traditional cookbooks tell you to soak dried beans before cooking them. Modern cooking websites often say it doesn't matter. In a way, they're both right. Soaking beans can help improve the texture of the final product once the beans are cooked and reduce the gas produced when the food is being digested.

A 12-hour soak in cold water before cooking helps hydrate the beans and considerably shortens cooking time. Ideally, beans should be put to soak the night before they are to be prepared and be kept in a cool place, or in the refrigerator, to avoid any fermentation taking place.

Then, I toss the blanched beans with olive oil, lemon juice and zest, garlic, and salt to pep up their flavor. Serve them just like that, or dress them up more with toasted almonds or pine nuts, grated Parmesan cheese, red pepper flakes, or fresh herbs like basil, parsley, or thyme.

Put a pan of salted water on to boil. Meanwhile, trim the the beans. Once the water is boiling, steam or boil the beans until tender. Drain well, then tip the cooked beans into the bowl with your dressing and toss everything together, making sure all the beans get coated.

What seasoning is best for green beans? ›

Garlic powder: We prefer using garlic powder here. Its finer consistency sticks to the green beans better than minced garlic. Onion powder: With its sharp pungency and ability to complement almost any savory flavor, onion powder is a must-have green bean seasoning.

Steaming green beans gives them the same crisp-tender texture as blanching or boiling. Yet I think it preserves their lovely green color and allows the home cook more control over their texture than with those other two methods. Steaming is easy, too—and ease is what this recipe is all about.

The key to the best beans is to master how long to boil green beans. Cook the green beans, covered, in a small amount of boiling salted water until crisp-tender: 10 to 15 minutes for whole or cut green beans. 5 to 10 minutes for french-cut green beans.

The best way to achieve this (and keep your veggies green) is by blanching, roasting or sautéing them. (Long cook times result in limp, soggy vegetables, void of both nutrition and colour.)