. . . Snap Beans (continued - again)

All right, now.  With the preliminaries out of the way, we can finally start cooking snap beans.

To do snap beans my way, you'll need at least 2 dry quarts of fresh green beans, preferably purchased at a road-side produce stand.  After you've tipped and tailed and strung and snapped the beans (Tuesday's post), rinse them but not for too long.  Just put them in a collander and run tap-water through them to rinse off any soil, fertilizer, or other unsavory stuff that might be on them.  A sink sprayer is ideal for this, but it may also be done by turning on the tap and moving the collander around in the stream.  Use cold water, and be sure you mix the beans in the collander so that they all get rinsed.

You may find that it's easier to do this in batches.  In fact you'll have to do it in batches if all the beans won't fit in your collander.  This goes for the sprayer method, too, incidentally. There are fewer things more unappetizing than biting into a snap bean, and hearing and feeling the "crunch" of sand in your mouth.  Be thorough.

Next, find yourself a pot (and a lid that fits it) that's large enough to hold your batch of snap beans and still have 3 to 5 inches between the top of the beans and the top rim.  It's time to season the beans, but you do this in the pot, before you add the beans.

Into pot, place some salt pork.  Salt pork is also known as fat back or streak-o-lean.  I've also used smoked ham hock.

If I'm using salt pork, I render it some.  Rendering is nothing more cooking the pork over a LOW fire until fat from the pork turns to liquid.  I don't cook all of the fat out of the pork, which would leave only bits of identifiable meat.  I just get some liquid fat, because I want substantial-sized pork pieces in the finished beans.
If I'm using a ham hock, however, I don't render it.

Incidentally, a ham hock is the cured and smoked joint (small) end of the shank of a ham.  It's used in the smokehouse as a convenient point of suspension, by which the cured ham is hung during smoking.  The hock is separated from the shank after the smoking process, as part of the process of preparing the ham for sale.  Ham hocks, traditional ones at least, are sold bone-in, but I've seen boned ham hocks for sale.  I won't say anything, positive or negative, about them because I've never used boned ham hocks myself.

Next, I add the snap beans to the seasoned pot.  Then I add enough tap-water to cover the beans (or more, if I'm really desparate for pot liquor that day), bring the pot to a boil, reduce heat, and cover and simmer over a LOW fire for at least one hour, usually longer.  During cooking, I look in now and then, and add water if the liquid in the pot looks like it's getting low.  Got to have plenty of pot liquor, you know.

Snap beans cooked this way can be a meal in itself, and was, in fact, a meal for many a South Georgia farmer (and 'towny' as well) not so long ago.  It's just plain good.  All you need to go with the beans is a big coffee mug or two of pot liquor, and a couple or three (or a dozen) hot corn muffins or (my favorite) corn sticks to dunk (or not) in the pot liquor, and you've got yourself a meal to satisfy the hungriest fieldhand.

Here's my recipe.

Snap Beans

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2 dry quarts snap-beans, tipped and tailed and strung and snapped.
Water.
Salt pork or ham hock.

To season snap beans, render salt pork in pot.  For ham hock, don't render; just add to pot to season.  Use as much or as little of either as you like.

Add beans.

Add tap-water to cover beans.

Bring pot to a rolling boil.

Reduce heat.  Cover and simmer for at least an hour, checking liquid level periodically, adding water as needed.

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This recipe can be varied by adding chopped onion, to taste, to the pot and sweating them after you've rendered the salt pork.  If you're seasoning with ham hock, you can sweat the onions in a little vegetable oil before adding the ham hock, and get the same result.

Also, you just might find that snap beans cooked this way are so good that you want to eat them often.  Well, don't.  It's kind of evident that this dish is a little on the heavy side when it comes to saturated fats.  While snap beans this way are good, I don't prepare them this way every time.  If I want snap beans with salt pork flavor, but without as much saturated fat, I use defatted bacon instead of salt pork.

To defat bacon, I take my trusty kitchen shears to strips of raw bacon, and I cut most of the fat and toss it.  This trick works best if the bacon is cold.  Then I toss the defatted bacon into the empty pot, but I don't render it because if I've done a good job of defatting, there's not enough fat left to render.  I'm just looking for pork flavor, anyway, and there's plenty of that in the lean part of the bacon,

Now, I've never done this, but I suppose that if you wanted a 'ham-hockish' flavor without the saturated fat,  you could use a ham flavoring.  There are many ham-flavored buillons, ham-flavored pastes, etc., available in supermarkets.  You would add the cubes, crystals, paste, or what have you, to the pot first, following the instructions on the package, before adding the beans and water.

Now, before you go off and substitute ham flavoring for ham hock, I have to caution you:  Most, or at least many, bouillons and other packaged flavoring agents I'm familiar with tend to be a little high in sodium.  If you're concerned about your and/or your family's sodium intake, you'll want to read carefully the nutritional information on the package when buying ham-flavored buillons and flavoring.  Actually, this caution applies when you're buying any meat-flavored buillons or meat-based flavorings.

That's it for today.  Try snap beans cooked my way, then let me know what you think.

Happy cooking!