I love making the traditional green bean casserole, but all from scratch. I make a homemade cream of mushroom soup, and I make oven-baked onions to use as the french-fried onion topping.
But I have a problem with the beans. I have boiled them and steamed them but they never seem to get as tender as I want them, or as tender as the canned beans.
I'm wondering if the canned beans are younger beans, and if the beans in the stores are older? I love crisp vegetables, but in this casserole I want more tender beans.
Should I slow-cook them, cook them for a couple hours, or what? Should I slice them the long way?
I read where adding a pinch of baking soda makes vegetables more tender but I can't find any research on that.
What do you do? Any ideas or suggestions?
I would just steam them longer. The reason the canned ones are so tender are because they are just sitting in liquid. I generally steam my beans for regular dinner consumption and if they're too hard, I do it longer. Good luck! I love the made from scratch casserole too!!
What I did this year, as I usually use frozen green beans, was blanch the beans after trimming and cutting them. They are in the freezer right now, and I'm hoping for tender beans when I cook them. One thing I do know is that with any type of bean DO NOT add any salt to the cooking liquid.
Also, we buy the fried shallots sold in Asian stores. It's tastes same, but MUCH cheaper.
I steam fresh green beans for casserole, but I like them crisp-tender. I hate mushy vegetables.
I would steam them for longer. I wouldn't cook them in water because a whole lot of the nutrition goes into the water, which you then throw out. I agree that canned beans are very low in nutrition and there are also grave concerns about what's in the can material that seeps into the foods. With fresh beans, the longer you cook them in water, the fewer nutrients they have. That doesn't make any sense if you are going to the trouble of making your own cream of mushroom soup, and then you use canned beans.
You could also use frozen beans, which are frozen right at the point of harvest and are nutrient-rich (at least at much as anything grown commercially these days!). Maybe if you used the French green beans which are sliced, they would cook faster and then be more soft for your casserole.
Canned beans have
- Been sitting in water for ages
- Been repeatedly frozen/half frozen/half boiled (while sitting in ginormous warehouses and in the shipping process. Half frozen in winter, half boiled in summer.
If you want canned bean texture:
Cut
Blanche
Freeze
THEN steam or in any other way cook the way you normally do
