Snap Beans - Four Ways!

The Spring harvest is on!  Tricia picked up a nifty basket from her mom that is coming in useful.  We filled it with zucchini, yellow crookneck and yellow straightneck squash.

But it's not just the squash coming in.  Our snap bean crop looks to be a bumper crop.  We've never picked this many on the first picking.  Tricia gave me "the look" when I started carrying all this in.  Harvesting is not the end of the work.  While they're fresh, we have to preserve the harvest.

Below you'll see Blue Lake Bush beans, Contender beans, Italian Roma beans and Purple TeePee beans.

We eat a bunch of them fresh.  So good. We like to cook them with new potatoes and butter.  Lately, we've been cooking them with tasso and that adds great smoky, seasoned flavor.

We also snap them and pressure can a number of pints.  The pressure cooker holds 10 quart jars at a time, so we try to do them in 10 pint batches.

With some of the straightest of the Blue Lake Bush beans, we pickled them in a vinegar solution with dill and red pepper flakes and garlic.  Crispy pickled green beans.  Yum!!

Then we blanched and froze six additional quart bags of Contenders.

The water bath canner holds 7 pints, so we have 7 pints of pickled beans.  In the pressure canner, we snapped and canned 10 pints of contenders/blue lake bush beans and 10 pints Italian Roma beans.

Tricia labeled them with dates and they're ready to go in the pantry.

Then for the fourth preservation method, we're trying something we've never done.  We are dehydrating some snap beans.  First we snapped them.

Then we blanched them.  They come out such a bright, healthy color.

Then we line the dehydrator trays (all 7 of them) with beans.  Here's the contenders:

Here are the Italian Romas:

After about 10-12 hours of drying, here's what they look like:

Seven trays made 2 quart jars of dried snap beans.

While we have fresh, we're eating fresh picked beans.  But in the late summer and winter, we'll try putting the dried beans in soups and stews and see how they turn out once they're rehydrated.  I ate a few of them plain.  They had a snap to them like potato chips.  They needed some salt, though!  Always looking for new ways to preserve the harvest.