Green Beans With Ginger and Garlic

I add 1 T of soy sauce and 1 T of White wine vinegar ( or sherry vinegar) for a minute, before the ginger and garlic. Delicious.

I never boil beans! They should actually be steamed. Bring the beans to a boil, then immediately turn off the heat and cover the pot. Let them sit for a few minutes, taste one to test, then drain.

If you do this, they will be perfect when reheated the next day.

At four minutes of boiling, I had already overcooked the beans. Check well before then.

We keep bags of fresh ginger in the freezer. When we want to use it in a finely-shredded way, we use a microplane. No need to thaw or peel -- just grate from frozen.

Don't understand why one would ever boil the beans. Boiling them changes the taste (dilutes the carbohydrates and thus the sweetness) and leaches out vitamins and other nutrients. Steaming cooks them more quickly because steam has a higher temperature than boiling water.

I stop cooking as soon as the color turns bright. Since garlic burns and turns bitter very quickly on high heat I get the beans heated through, then add ginger to warm up, add the garlic last, just to warm up and scent the air. For best flavor, do not let garlic color beyond golden, remove from pan immediately.

With 2 1/2 lbs of beans, this works very well in a wok, do the whole thing in one shot. And if you throw in a few mushrooms it works even better.

Cook beans 3 minutes and Test for doneness.

Cooked bean 2 minutes Added soy sauce to ginger and garlic, cut the oil in half

I enjoy lightly steaming the beans, not cook them through, then saute them at high heat, adding the garlic, etc. toward the end as not to scorch.

I agree with the other posters, the beans get tender VERY quickly and I would start checking even after 1 minute. Also, I melted down a touch of butter in a small sauce pan and added the ginger/garlic mixture- heating and stirring for maybe 2 minutes. I then combined it with the beans in the skillet. Delicious results!

Added a little toasted sesame oil to make it more blatantly Asian. Might try adding chopped fermented black beans next time for more umami.

This was awesome! Will make again and again. I added a bit of fresh lemon zest right before serving:)

Ginger is fiber and juice, so pressing it won't get you the intensity of flavor because, as you said, you'll get juice. Grating it on a box grater will work for incorporation of the flavor, or finely chopping it will give you bits of intense flavor.

These were great! I thought that maybe the recipe was calling for too much ginger but it married to the garlic and beans wonderfully. To save time, I used packaged--Yes, more expensive-- green beans that had already been cleaned and the stems cut off.