Forget the mushy, overly sweet bean salads you find in a jar or can on grocery store shelves. Bean salads should be filling yet taste light and fresh, especially when made in summer and fall with fresh green beans but even in winter if you substitute pickled ones.
The freshest snap beans, also called string or green beans, pop when you break them into pieces and can be eaten raw. My favorites have purple or speckled pods, adding more hues to this already-colorful salad, but they turn green if cooked. I only recommend cooking fresh beans for salads if they stayed on the plant a bit too long and the pods remain slender yet have lost their snap. In that case, blanch them in boiling water for a couple of minutes and then immediately plunge them into an ice bath to retain some crunchiness.
For out-of-season salads, I prefer pickled snap beans to frozen or pressure-canned ones. The tender pods stay crunchier when pickled, even when processed in a boiling water bath. The pickling brine can replace the vinegar in the salad dressing. Brined beans, fermented for up to two weeks in salt brine, have a sour taste that some people find too strong in a salad.
Once noticeable lumps of beans appear, the pods toughen as they transition to shell beans. That’s exactly what the other beans are in this salad: varieties left on the plant until the pods and beans inside them become dry and the shelled beans can be cooked, sprouted or planted as seeds for next year’s crop. I mostly grow shell beans to attract pollinators to the garden and improve the soil, choosing colorful, less common varieties like speckled cranberry, scarlet runner and jet-black Cherokee. I cook some of each year’s small harvest as unique replacements for store-bought cans.
Other replacements based on the season include scallions for chives, dried herbs for the other fresh ones and roasted bell pepper, sundried tomatoes or marinated artichoke hearts for tomatoes. Crumbled cheeses work as well as cubes, and a tablespoon of toasted pumpkin or other seeds adds crunch.
Three-Bean Salad with Fresh Herbs
Serves 4-6
8 ounces fresh snap beans, broken into 1-inch pieces
1 15-ounce can or 2 cups cooked kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 15-ounce can or 2 cups cooked cannellini beans, rinsed and drained
8 ounces cherry tomatoes, halved
2 cloves roasted or fresh garlic, minced
1/4 cup Creamy Balsamic Salad Dressing
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil or parsley
2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
6 ounces mozzarella, cubed (optional)
In a large salad bowl, combine the snap, kidney and cannellini beans and the tomatoes. Add the garlic and toss thoroughly to mix. Pour the dressing over the bean mixture and then fold it into the salad. Top with the basil, oregano, chives and cheese, if desired, and then mix gently to combine. Set the salad in the refrigerator for one hour to let the flavors blend.
Julie Laing is a Bigfork-based cookbook author and food blogger at TwiceAsTasty.com.