Excerpted from Crescent Dragonwagon’s Bean by Bean.
As you have probably gathered, I love baked beans, don’t mind the complications of a cassoulet, and can’t resist the occasional slightly frou-froued retro bean-plus-cheese-topped casserole. But all these are primarily winter dishes, for occasional use—just a few times every year. What will you find being made in our kitchen all summer long, over and over? When the yellow colander is filled to overflowing with green and yellow beans from the garden, just picked as the setting sun pinked and purpled the sky over the pond, these are my first thought. Simple, delicious, easy, easy, easy, they don’t get the kitchen too hot for too long. A huge pile of these and some parsleyed, buttered new potatoes, maybe some sliced garden tomatoes, is a fine summer supper: not for company, just for, as the Rastafarians say, I-and-I.
Use beans that are not too mature for this: They don’t have to be the little tiny skinny fillet beans (haricots verts), but neither should they be so large you can see the shape of the actual beans starting to round the pod. Ideally, your beans should all be about the same thickness. This dish is excellent made with Romanos, the flat Italian green beans, too.
Oven-Roasted Green Beans
Print RecipeIngredients
- About 1 pound not-too-plump green beans, yellow wax beans, or a combination of the two, tipped and tailed
- 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil (see Note)
- Coarse sea salt
- Freshly cracked black pepper
Instructions
Preheat the oven to as high as it will go without defaulting to broil. Place a silicone baking mat in a rimmed baking sheet. (If you don’t have such a mat, use extra oil—3 or 4 tablespoons, and give the baking sheet a good shake halfway through cooking.)
In a large bowl, toss the beans with the olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste. Transfer them to the prepared baking sheet, spreading the beans so there’s plenty of air space between them and they don’t overlap too much.
Bake the beans until they are shriveled, browned—sort of unattractive—crispish on the outside, and quite tender within, 18 to 20 minutes (if the hottest you can get your oven before broiling is 450°F, it might be more like 25 to 30 minutes). Serve, hot, right away.
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