1,560 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

Beans in primeur

As I write this, it is the beginning of the short season for fresh beans. If you've never made them before and you're just starting out (and that's a great idea) you'll find that it's a bit time consuming to prepare, you have to shell them once, remove the beans, scald them to remove the skin (and the germ for the purists) and then only use them in a recipe.

It's hard work, but it's delicious...

This being said, there is a little known aspect about beans, they are the so-called "primeur" or "en primeur" beans, which are prepared in a very different and much faster way.

14 K

Keywords for this post:Beans Early vegetables Green vegetables Pods

Last modified on: June 4^th 2022

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

Beans in primeur

In early season?

This is said of beans at the very beginning of the season, when they are still small, 8-10 cm maximum, and very tender.
If you find some of this size, you often have to ask the farmer, it's quite surprising but you should know that everything is eaten in the beans at this time, the beans of course (not very big at this age), but also the pod that contains them.

How to do it ?

The trick is to work them a bit like green beans:

fèves entières
1) We break the 2 ends of the terminal by pulling to remove any wires, but there are very few in general.

fèves lavées et séchées
2) We wash and dry them.

fèves taillées
3) We cut them in small pieces, to your taste.

fèves en cuisson
4) We cook these small pieces as you are used to with other green vegetables, I like to cook them first in English (boiling salted water 3-4 minutes) and then cooled and drained, returned with a knob of butter or a little olive oil.

You will be surprised by the taste, something between snap beans and peas it seems, and the texture, very soft.

Don't hesitate to mix these beans with other vegetables for a varied and colorful dish.

To sum up: You can enjoy early beans, at the beginning of the season, by treating them a bit like green beans, which allows you to eat the whole pod, it is both delicious and very economical.

Lasts posts

Pre-calibrated pastry dough

When making pie dough (shortbread, shortcrust, sweet...), it's always a good idea to make a lot at once, and then divide it into pieces, which you can freeze. I've already pointed out the mistake not to make, which is to form a ball before freezing. It's difficult to roll out afterwards because...
March 9^th 20265295

Butter vs. grease

We often read in a recipe where a pastry is put into a mould that, just before pouring, the mould should be buttered or greased. But what's the difference between these 2 terms?
December 1^st 20252,8335

Getting out of the fridge early

Very often when you're cooking, you need to take food or preparations out of the fridge, to use them in the recipe in progress. There's nothing tricky about this: you just take them out of the fridge and use them, usually immediately, in the recipe. But is this really a good method?
November 24^th 20251,8145

Who's making the croissants?

When you look at a bakery from the outside, you naturally think that in the bakery, the bakers make the bread, and in the laboratory, the pastry chefs make the cakes. It's very often like that, with each of these professions having quite different ways of working, but sometimes there's also one...
November 23^th 20251,646

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20255,6995

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

Cleaning endives

If you buy your endives elsewhere than in supermarkets, and in this case the best is of course from a market gardener, he or she is the one who planted and harvested them, in this case you will have endives full of earth or sand, depending on where they were grown, which is normal and reassuring, we...
March 24^th 202027 K4.6

The color of the bread crumb

When you go to buy bread, at your baker's, at the time of the choice, if you hesitate of course, you will undoubtedly be very sensitive to the color of the crust, and you will be right. The color of the crust, from golden, to sometimes very dark, deep brown almost black, depending on the maturity...
April 30^th 202222 K4.6

What is the difference between bakery and patisserie?

This is a question that you may well have asked yourself and which I will attempt to answer. In France the two trades of "boulangerie" (bakery) and "pâtisserie" (patisserie and confectionery) have always been quite distinct, but where exactly do the boundaries lie? .
February 7^th 2017135 K 14.1

Thermal inertia or "out of the fire"

When you're cooking, you need a lot of heat to cook, and most of the time it's on the fire, literally if you're on gas, more indirectly if you're not. An expression that comes up quite often is "Off the heat", but what does it really mean?
December 12^th 202011 K4.6

Unmoulding cakes while hot

When you make a cake, pound cake or whatever (what bakers call a "travel cake" because it's easy to carry around) you've most likely made a batter, either by hand or in a food processor, which you then pour into a buttered pan. It's a classic, and I've already talked to you about 2 or 3 tips on...
February 6^th 202139 K4.6