. . . 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!

. . . Snap Beans (continued)

I know what I said yesterday, but today we'll talk only about buying snap beans.  I had second thoughts about covering buying beans and cooking beans in the same post.  There's just too much information, so we'll consider the cooking of snap beans in tomorrow's post.

Since I don't grow them myself, I have to buy my snap beans.  If you live in an area where snap beans are grown and are sold by growers (or others) at road-side produce stands, you're in luck.  These stands are the best places to buy green beans and other produce, because the produce is fresh and has been subjected to a minimum of handling.  In some cases, the stand is adjacent to the field.  The only handling the beans go through are harvesting, by manual or mechanical means, and transportation to the stand, likely by means of the farmer's own tractor or pick-up truck.  The beans you purchase in the afternoon were likely picked that morning.  You can't get beans fresher than that unless you grow them yourself.

While a road-side produce stand is my ideal source, you can get good beans at a supermarket or grocery store.  You have to be careful, though.  Actually, you should be careful wherever and whenever you buy snap beans, and other produce as well, for that matter.

For snap beans, you'll want a fresh look and feel - light green and firm.  If the beans are limp and they look shriveled, or their skins are wrinkled, don't buy them.

Snap beans should smell fresh, too.  I can't describe what to smell for in words.  Since we don't have technology equivalent to scratch-and-sniff available on the internet yet, all I'll say is this:  If the beans have a musty odor about them, they're probably moldy; give 'em a miss.  And do not even consider beans if there's any black color on them; either they're moldy or they're beginning to rot.

All produce is subject to damage during harvesting, whether harvested by mechanical harvester or hand-picked, and during later handling.  That's just a fact of life if you're born a fruit or vegetable.  String beans are no exception.  Expect some of the beans to be broken or scathed.  You don't, however, want to see too many such specimens.

Now, as to how much to buy, snap beans are customarily sold by the pound in supermarkets and groceries.  Road-side produce stands sometimes sell by weight, but more often they sell by volume.  In the State of Georgia at least, this is probably on account of you must weigh goods in a legal-for-trade scale, which must be inspected, at the merchant's expense, annually by the Weights and Measures division of the State Department of Agriculture. Such scales ain't cheap, and neither is the inspecion fee, so road-side stand operators sell by volume to avoid the expense.

This is not a bad thing for you though, though.  In the first place, it saves you money and, and in the second, you're interested in volume, rather than weight, anyway.   Most of the road-side stands I've visited display their goods in half-peck (4 dry quarts) baskets.  One-half peck is about 270 cubic inches.  To give you an idea of its size, a typical rectangular half-peck basket measures approximately 11-1/2 inches long, by (aprox.) 6-3/4 inches wide, by (approx.) 4-1/2 inches deep.

Now, I've been known to buy a half-peck basket of beans, at least when the snap bean fit really takes me.  A half-peck cooks up into a lot of beans, however, so if the fit's not on me, I'll purchase only half that amount, or 2 dry quarts.  I've found that, for many recipes, there's a sort of minimum amount I need to get the results I want (one expected result is that there's plenty of pot liquor), and for snap beans, that minimum is 2 quarts.  I may be able to get away with using less and still get good results, but certainly not much less.  Depending on how you like your snap beans, though, you may be able to use considerably less than I do.

Incidentally, if you're forced to buy snap beans by the pound and you're wondering whether there's some formula to convert weight to volume for snap beans, there isn't.  This is because the volume of a pound of snap beans (and other produce, too) varies.  Based on the time of harvest, how long they've been sitting, where the beans were grown, how much they were watered while they were growing, etc., a given volume of snap beans' weight can vary all over the place.  All this means, though, is that you'll simply have to learn how to judge volume by eye, just like our ancestors did.  It's only a matter of practice, not rocket science.

Happy cooking!

Great green gobs of . . .

. . . beans.

Green beans, string beans, snap beans . . . whatever you want to call them.

I figured it was time for a break from steak, and snap beans are a darn good side dish to accompany any main course, including sundry variations of breaded and fried cubed steak.

There was a time in South Georgia when almost everybody kept a vegetable garden and grew this delicious legume, in one variety or another, every summer.  And with the long growing season and other favorable conditions, even if you were too feeble, or too lazy, or were otherwise disinclined to plant and tend a garden, you still could get home-grown string beans.  Chances were, your neighbor had a garden, was overrun with beans, and was more than willing to share.

Some years we had a garden, some years we didn't.  Regardless, we enjoyed snap beans when they were in season.  On many a summer morning, you could find Nannie sitting on her front porch, preparing snap beans for the noon meal.  She would 'tip and tail' each bean, and 'string' it in the process, and then 'snap' it.  It was a labor-intensive affair, but it was a labor of love for Nannie, and it's still a labor of love for me.  Here's how it's done.

First, you tip and tail the bean.  What does that mean?  Tipping and tailing is the act of removing of the 'tip', or stem, of the bean, and removing of the 'tail', or the end of the bean opposite the stem, which actually looks like a little green tail.  Don't use a knife for this.  Break the tip and the tail off the bean.  If there's a 'string' in the bean, you'll see it.  Since the 'string' of a string bean has roughly the toughness, texture, and mouth-feel of monofilament fishing line, it needs to be removed.  Just strip it away as you remove the tip or tail.

After you've tipped and tailed and strung the bean, you 'snap' it by breaking it into bite-sized pieces.  Incidentally, if you haven't guessed, a 'snap bean' is so called because of the snapping sound it makes when you break it. 

These operation must be performed on each and every bean in the batch, and can be tiring if your doing a dinner-size 'mess' (a term people in the South used to use to describe a substantial quantity of anything) of snap beans.  You're going to a lot of trouble, granted, but for fresh snap beans, it's worth it.  Besides, it's the only way I know of, short of paying someone else to do it, to get fresh snap beans.

Tomorrow, I'll share with you what I look for in beans when I buy them at the market (too lazy to plant a garden these days), and how I fix 'em, with lots of pot liquor.

Happy cooking!