Fresh Picks: Green Beans 101

Welcome back to Fresh Picks, where we celebrate the seasonal ingredients we can’t get enough of. We've swooned over peas and blistered, sometimes-spicy shishito peppers. We've gotten excited about eggplant. And now, we're highlighting one of late summer's most versatile legumes: green beans.

What, exactly, is a green bean? Is it a bean like a kidney or black bean or something else entirely?

If you’ve wondered this, you’re not alone. For one, they look fundamentally different and are cooked in wildly different ways. For instance, green beans can be blanched and eaten in minutes, while dried beans may need hours to simmer until tender. So how could they possibly be related?

Well, hold onto your hollyhocks: Green beans or “snap beans” are from the same family as dried beans like pinto or cranberry beans. They’re simply immature bean pods, grown to be eaten whole while the pod and seeds inside are still tender, rather than left to mature and dry. Knowing that, the name starts to make a little more sense.

They’re picked young, in other words, “green,” before the seeds inside have fully matured. That said, you can find purple or yellow snap beans, too. Haricots verts, or French green beans, are slender varieties prized for staying especially thin and tender. And string beans? That’s simply another name for the green bean, dating back to varieties that had a fibrous string running along the pod.

So yes, green beans are legumes, just like your favorite dried beans.

How to Buy and Store Green Beans

To prep them, slice or snap off the stem end before cooking or eating raw. Store them unwashed with their stems still attached in the refrigerator until you’re ready to use them.

4 Delicious Ideas for Cooking with Green Beans

Slice green beans very thinly on the bias before blanching for salads, where they’re delightfully crunchy, or bake them smothered under béchamel for a deeply comforting casserole. We love them perhaps best of all in a French Niçoise salad. Read on for our favorite ways to cook this delicious green vegetable.

1. Niçoise Salad

Capture the taste of summer in the South of France with a classic Niçoise. It’s a salade composée (a composed salad), which means everything is artfully arranged on the plate rather than tossed together in a bowl. Here, steamed haricots verts, halved tomatoes, Kalamata olives, tuna fillets and baby potatoes are drizzled with a punchy mustard vinaigrette enriched with shallot and a touch of honey. (Of course, you can leave the honey out if you’re feeling traditional.) Chopped dill and capers add hits of fresh, briny flavor that keep every forkful interesting.

Though a French person might turn up their nose at tinkering with a classic Niçoise, we say, "Proceed with confidence." Add roasted red peppers or hunks of feta, swap the steamed potatoes for crispy roasted ones or ditch our vinaigrette for a favorite dressing. It may not pass muster in Nice, but it’ll taste excellent at your kitchen table.

2. Homemade Green Bean Casserole

You either grew up in a family who considered green bean casserole an essential component of your Thanksgiving table, or you didn’t. But regardless of which camp you fall into there’s one clear answer now that this rendition has entered the picture: You’re a green bean casserole person now. Ours combines green beans with a lemon-, garlic- and Parmesan-enriched béchamel rather than the standard canned soup, and tops the dish off with a pile of buttermilk-battered fried onions.

3. Crunchy Green Bean Salad

File this way of cooking green beans away for fall: Slice a mix of yellow and green beans on the bias, blanch them until just tender, then shock them in ice water so they stay crisp and bright. From there, they mingle with pecans, radicchio, fennel, dried cranberries and goat cheese under a mustardy vinaigrette. It’s a dream dinner-party salad, but just as useful on a weeknight. Add baked salmon, seared steak or a few hard-cooked eggs and suddenly salad is dinner.

4. Honey-Garlic Shrimp with Blistered Green Beans

A homemade stir-fry is hard to beat, and this grilled version is ready for its medal. After charring green beans in your Hybrid BBQ Grill Pan, toss them with honey-garlic sauce before pairing them with shellacked honey-garlic shrimp. It’s just this side of too much of a good thing. We’ll be making this one again and again. Hot tip: Use our handy rice pot to make the dreamiest steamed rice for serving.