Preparing Green Beans for a Healthy Cooking Recipe

"Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today I am going to show you a method that is referred to in a lot of recipes and a lot of cooking demonstrations and such is a shocking and blanching. Those two are usually used within the same technique. I've got some fresh cut green beans and the purpose behind this is that we are going to par cook these, blanch is a sense and I've got some water fixing to boil behind me on the stove top. I've got these Kentucky Wonder Beans; I use these because they are nice and crunchy and fresh green beans of course, are years ahead of any can vegetable. You could also use haricot vert which is a French green bean, a little thinner and a little bit more bright green color to it. The tips of these usually stay for presentation purposes. The tops however, are snapped off and in the South some people refer to them as snap beans. So we usually just pop those off. You can use a knife; I've got a chef's utility knife here in the event that we need to do that. Some of the tops are missing on these. So whenever its dried you can tell its got a little bit darker, so we just want to go ahead and just loft that off because no one wants to eat that. We will trim these. What is going to happen is we are going to plunge them into the water behind me on the stove top once we've gotten a boil going and as that happens, we will show you the green bean starts to become real nice and shiny and pretty. At that point, we want to pull them out of there and that's only going to take a couple of minutes and we will pull them out of there with this and let the water drain off. I'm going to throw into my Pyrex bowl which is an ice pack and what happens is it shocks the vegetables essentially so we go from a very high temperature to a very cold one and it stops the cooking process but it also maintains the crispness of the green bean and the color as well so that when we cook them for the final cooking procedure when they are ready to go on a plate, they'll withhold that color and that same crispiness which is the reason that we do all of this. Many times people will try to cook vegetables from start to finish in water and they tend to come out bland and mushy and that kind of thing. So this is a really easy two-step process that will extend the life of these things and make them look a lot nicer on the plate. We will come back here in just one minute and show you the boiling procedure and the icing procedure once they are done."