Indiana · Side
Indiana Green Bean Casserole
- Easy
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 700g green beans, trimmed
- 55g butter
- 250g mushrooms, sliced
- 1 onion, diced
- 3 tbsp flour
- 500ml milk
- 120ml cream
- 1 tsp soy sauce
- For topping: 2 onions sliced thin, 60g flour, oil for frying
- Salt and pepper
Equipment
Deep-fry pot
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedDraining fried food: a rack, never paperBlanching & shocking
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · soy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Fry the thin-sliced onions in flour until crisp and gold for the topping; drain and salt.
- Blanch the beans 4 min and drain. 4 min
- Sweat the mushrooms and diced onion in the butter, stir in the flour, and cook 2 min. Whisk in the milk and cream and simmer to a sauce. Add soy sauce, salt, and pepper. 2 min
- Fold in the beans and turn into a baking dish.
- Bake at 190C for 20 min, top with the crisp onions, and bake 5 min more. 20 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
Draining fried food: a rack, never paper 77 recipes
- The rack was in place before the first thing went into the oil, not fetched afterwards while food waited in a spider over the pot.
- It lands on a rack with air moving underneath it. Anything set down on paper or a flat plate traps its own steam against its base.
- Salted within seconds of landing, while it is still hot enough to take seasoning.
- A minute later the underside is still as crisp as the top: no soft flat patch where it has been sitting.
- Nothing is stacked or piled while hot, however tempting it is to keep it together. A pile steams itself soft from the inside out.
Where it goes wrong It was drained on paper, or piled up to keep warm. Steam leaving the food has nowhere to go but back into the crust, so the underside softens within a minute: the crispness the frying just bought is gone before the plate reaches the table.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Nebbiolo (Langhe) or aged Pinot Noir
- Also Right
- White Burgundy for cream-based versions
- From the Taps
- Dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Roasted barley tea
Earth speaking to earth: forest-floor reds echo fungal depth; truffle and Nebbiolo literally share a hillside and a season.
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