String Beans
Ingredients
Directions
Salt the beans
String the beans carefully and cut them into short lengths.
Sprinkle salt over the beans and mix thoroughly.
Let the beans sit in the salt overnight.
Pack the beans tightly into jars or kegs without their juice.
In two weeks, wash the cloth covering the jars and check the beans.
Cook to serve
To cook, soak the desired amount of beans in cold water overnight.
In the morning, boil the soaked beans in cold water for one hour.
Pour off the boiling water, add fresh water, and prepare as you would fresh beans.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- String beans
- Serve as the vegetable that the salt cure preserves and softens for later cooking.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws out moisture from the beans and preserves them through fermentation and long storage.
The step that matters
Pouring off the boiling water before cooking. Salt-cured beans are very salty, so the first boil is discarded and fresh water is used. Soaking and boiling draw out much of the salt, which keeps the finished dish from tasting overly salty.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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