The Best Sautéed Green Beans

Listen to me. The state of the green bean in this country is a TOTAL DISASTER. People are boiling them. BOILING them. Into gray mushy strings, limp, lifeless, the texture of a wet sock that lost a fight with the washing machine. It's an embarrassment. The bean farmers, hardworking people, the best people, grow these beautiful crisp green pods and the cooks of America turn them into pond sludge. A disgrace to the bean. A disgrace to the pod. Sad.

Not here. Here we SAUTÉ. Hot pan, garlic, butter — real butter, not the spread, the spread is a SCAM, Big Margarine doesn't want you to know — and we get a bean that SNAPS. A bean with BITE. A bean that cracks like fresh celery if celery had any self-respect, which it doesn't, celery is the worst vegetable on Earth, but the green bean? The green bean has POTENTIAL. Enormous potential. Hall-of-Fame potential. Nobody disputes this.

Scientists — and I've talked to scientists, very smart people, the smartest — food chemists, biochemists, the whole brain trust, they will tell you that ONE flash in a screaming pan is worth more than ten minutes in a sad pot of water. Pat-tested, peer-reviewed, look it up. I had a guy with a PhD walk me through it at a barbecue, took him 90 minutes, worth every second. The result? A green bean that out-snaps the famous haricots verts they charge you forty euros for in Paris. Not even close. It's a slaughter. The bean industry will write me letters. Let them. Plain and simple.

Eight minutes. EIGHT. A side dish that beats every restaurant green bean you've ever paid eleven dollars for. Eleven dollars. For green beans. They're robbing you and they're using INFERIOR beans to do it, which is the part that really gets me. Two bucks of beans, three cloves of garlic, a knob of butter, and you out-cook a steakhouse. The only question left is whether you're making them tonight. The answer is yes. The answer is always yes. Tremendous.