Sweet and Sour Green Beans with Bacon Recipe - These Old Cookbooks (2024)

FAQs

How do you can green beans the old fashioned way? ›

Pour the cans of green beans into a pot liquid and all. Add the beef bouillon, bacon bits, dried minced onion, salt and pepper. Stir everything together, bring to a simmer and let cook for 10-15 minutes. Serve and enjoy!

This is an example of creating your own recipe can be a dangerous practice. While bacon and green beans are both low-acid foods, there are no processing recommendations for canning bacon. Therefore, can the beans by themselves. Then when ready to eat the beans, add the bacon just before serving.

Sautéing: Sautéing green beans in a pan with some olive oil or butter and garlic is a great way to add flavor and texture. Cook them until they are crisp-tender.

They can be eaten raw, steamed, boiled, stir-fried or baked, made into a delicious green bean soup, or added to stews and casseroles, including Thanksgiving favourite, green bean casserole. Their tender texture also makes them perfect for coating in batter and deep-frying.

Unless the recipe tells you to keep the canned beans in their liquid, you should drain your can and give the beans a good rinse before using. This will improve the flavor and texture of your finished dish. Open your cans of beans using a can opener. There may be sharp edges from opening the can.

Add the garlic, oregano, chili powder, and cumin and cook for 1 minute, stirring frequently. Add in the drained beans, bay leaves, and broth or water. Cook for 5-10 minutes, or until the beans are warmed through, then remove the bay leaves.

Those aromatics in the pot will revolutionize the beans' final flavor. The aromatics I tend to use are onions, carrots, garlic, and celery, and then heartier, woodsy herbs, like rosemary, sage, and thyme, which marry beautifully with the earthy-sweet flavor of beans.

My latest canning adventures have included everything from canned cheese to canned butter to canned bacon. To can bacon all you need are quart jars, 12-inch-wide masking paper, pressure canner, and bacon. Cut a piece of masking paper 18 inches long and lay your bacon out in a single layer.

When green beans taste more like freshly-mown grass than food, and their texture is more squeaky-snap than chewable, we're not cooking them any more. We're undercooking them. Even worse, these undercooked vegetables have such a "green" flavor, we need to drown them in sauce to make them taste decent.

How do you dress up green beans? ›

Then, I toss the blanched beans with olive oil, lemon juice and zest, garlic, and salt to pep up their flavor. Serve them just like that, or dress them up more with toasted almonds or pine nuts, grated Parmesan cheese, red pepper flakes, or fresh herbs like basil, parsley, or thyme.

There are several reasons. First, the beans may be too mature which makes them too starchy. The starch settles out of the food during canning. Second, minerals in hard water can give a cloudy appearance.

In the simplest method of home canning — the water bath method — you fill jars with acidic food, cover them with lids and boil them in a pot of water for a specific amount of time to kill bacteria. You then remove the jars and wait for the satisfying “pop” of the lids sealing as they cool.

Because green beans are low in acidity, they have to be canned in a pressure canner so they're safe to eat up to a year later. But if you're willing to increase the acidity of your green beans by pickling them, you can process them in a water-bath canner.

To each gallon of water, add 1 tablespoon salt and 2 tablespoons vinegar. Bring to a boil. Add beans and boil 20 minutes. Put in sterilized jars and add liquid, and seal at once.

After they are picked I wash them, stem the ends and cut them into small bite size pieces. I usually do this the night before I can, put them in a big bowl of water, and place them in the fridge overnight until I'm ready to can in the morning.