. . . 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!