Blanching Green Beans for a Healthy Cooking Recipe

"Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today we are showing you a blanching and shocking procedure on some Kentucky Wonder Beans today and this will work with just about any kind of vegetable to be honest with you. I've had the wonder beans inside the boiling water here for approximately 2 plus minutes and don't rely just on times and temperatures all the time. You will become a lot better cook when you start to realize what heat does to food and all ovens and stove tops are going to cook differently but it is more of a touch and a feel thing. So these are nice and tender as you can see and they are not so hot that I can't hold them. So they are a little bit bendable; they've got a nice pretty color to them and we are going to bite into one. Still nice and crunchy, has a real vibrant flavor, so we want to go ahead and stop the cooking process now because if we keep cooking in that water, essentially they are going to become bland and mushy and water logged. We are going to go ahead and just dump these into the ice water bath and just make sure those get submerged. So now what has happened is we've gone from really hot obviously environment into a cold one. So we've shut down the cooking process, put the brakes on it if you will and I am just going to let this guy sit there and chill for a little bit. Once I pull them out, we will pack them dry with a paper towel and we will leave that paper towel a little damp. At that point, we can just keep them in the refrigerator until they are ready for cooking. The cooking procedure that I am going to show you next on this will be a light sautee with some fresh garlic and maybe a little bit of shallots and some clarified butter. So this helps us in the sense that these guys are going to stay nice and crisp and green throughout that second cooking process which I will show you and it's already cut the cooking time by approximately two-thirds because it's really not going to take that long once we do them on the stove top. So it's a little short cut plus it keeps the vegetables nice and fresh and it's a much healthier way to eat versus the can vegetables."