Sauté-Blanched Green Beans

Reader Contribution by Ellen Sandbeck
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Every year I increase my green bean plantings, yet no matter how many beans I plant, no matter how many beans I freeze, it never seems to be enough. We never make it all the way through winter with a single bean left in our freezer. I would eat green beans every day if I could, and therein lies the problem.

Unfortunately, blanching green beans is a job that I never really mastered well enough to do by myself in an energy-efficient fashion. One year I bucked the experts’ advice and froze a few bags of beans without blanching them first. That experiment was extremely successful: I proved beyond any reasonable doubt that if you freeze beans without heating them to inactivate their enzymes, the result will be beans so disgustingly bland and mushy that they can’t even be thrown in a soup. My worms enjoyed them though!

So a few ye

ars ago, I decided to try another experiment. Rather than blanching beans for two minutes in a big pot of boiling water, cooling them in ice water for five minutes, dabbing them dry with a towel, then packing them into a freezer bag, I decided to determine whether I could kill those troublesome enzymes by heating the beans in a very large sauté pan. So I washed and destemmed a gallon or so of beans, poured a tablespoon of olive oil into the pan, added about a quarter inch of water, turned the burner on medium heat, and let the water come to a slow boil before I filled the pan with green beans and closed the lid.

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