Green Beans with Toasted Almonds
Blanched, shocked in ice water to lock the colour, then finished in brown butter with almonds and lemon.
Nutrition Info (per serving)
- 220
- Calories
- 6g
- Protein
- 18g
- Fat
- 12g
- Carbs
Ingredients
- 500 g green beans
- 60 g flaked almonds
- 40 g butter
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 lemon
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- Salt and black pepper
Instructions
- 1Bring a large pan of water to a rolling boil and salt it heavily — it should taste like seawater. Green beans absorb very little in their short cooking time, so the water needs to be aggressive.
- 2Prepare a bowl of iced water beside the hob.
- 3Trim the beans and drop them into the boiling water. Cook for 3 to 4 minutes, until bright green and tender with a definite snap.
- 4Lift them straight into the iced water. This shocking step stops the cooking instantly and sets the chlorophyll — beans left to cool in air keep cooking and turn the drab olive colour of tinned ones.
- 5Once completely cold, drain them and dry them thoroughly. Wet beans will spit in the butter and dilute the sauce.
- 6Slice the garlic thinly.
- 7Toast the flaked almonds in a dry frying pan over medium heat for 3 to 4 minutes, shaking often, until golden. Tip them out — left in the pan they carry on browning and turn bitter.
- 8Add the butter to the same pan over medium heat and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, until the milk solids at the base turn deep golden and it smells nutty.
- 9Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds only, then add the beans and the olive oil and toss for 2 minutes until heated through and coated.
- 10Take off the heat, add the almonds, the juice of half the lemon, salt and plenty of pepper, and toss once more.
Green beans almondine is an old French side dish and it survives because it is genuinely good. Two techniques make the difference between this and the sad grey beans of institutional catering.
Blanch and shock
Green vegetables owe their colour to chlorophyll, which is destroyed by prolonged heat and by acid. Brief cooking in a large volume of heavily salted boiling water sets the colour brilliantly; a large volume matters because the water should not lose its boil when the beans go in.
The shocking is the half people skip. A hot bean removed from water is still around 90C in the centre and keeps cooking for several minutes, dulling to olive green and going soft.
Plunging them into iced water stops that dead. The colour stays vivid and the texture stays snappy.
It also means you can blanch hours ahead and finish in the pan at the last minute, which is why restaurants do it this way.
Salt the water like seawater
Beans spend three minutes in the water and absorb very little. Lightly salted water seasons them almost not at all.
Heavily salted water — genuinely more than seems reasonable — is the only chance to season them from the inside. You are not eating the water.
Brown butter, and the order of operations
Toast the almonds first and remove them. Then brown the butter in the same pan. Doing it the other way round means the almonds sit in hot butter for too long and turn bitter.
Garlic goes in for thirty seconds at the end of the browning, not the start — it burns in brown butter within about a minute.
Dry the beans
Beans straight from the ice bath are soaked. Water hitting hot butter spits, and it dilutes what should be a glossy coating into a watery pool.
Pat them dry, or spin them in a salad spinner.
Nutrition
Around 220 calories a serving, most of it from the butter and almonds.
Green beans are a good source of vitamin K, vitamin C and folate, and blanching briefly retains far more vitamin C than a long boil, which leaches it into the water.
Almonds bring vitamin E, magnesium and most of the protein here.
Blanched beans keep for three days in the fridge, which makes this a five-minute side dish on the day you actually want it.
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