Simple Sautéed Green Beans

The best recipe for crisp and flavorful sautéed green beans, in only 10 minutes!

The vegetable most commonly seen on my family’s dinner table is probably broccoli. Mostly because it’s one of my daughter and husband’s favorites. But the second most common vegetable is definitely sautéed green beans. 

Fun fact: green beans are actually a legume. But unlike other legumes – more commonly known as beans – green beans are harvested and eaten with their enclosing pods before the bean seeds inside have fully matured.

I have fond childhood memories of picking green beans (though I think we called them “string beans”) from my family’s vegetable garden in the summer. Green beans are pretty prolific, so there would always be a ton, but they are also a great kid friendly vegetable to harvest. 

For a long time, I thought there were only two good ways to eat green beans: covered in mushroom gravy and crispy french-fried onions at Thanksgiving, or steamed. I experimented with roasting but never found a recipe I loved and it was much too easy to overcook them and render them inedible. But then, I discovered the perfect, easiest way to cook green beans: sauté and steam!

Sauté is a French cooking term that means to cook something quickly in hot fat or oil. This recipe is called “Simple Sautéed Green Beans” because it truly is simple. Only three “real” ingredients – green beans, olive oil and garlic powder – and just 10 minutes until they are on your table. They stay crisp and green and the flavor is more interesting than just plain old steamed green beans.

If you have any green bean “haters” in your household (maybe it’s you?) definitely give this one a try!

Simple Sautéed Green Beans Ingredients

• Green Beans: You’ll want to use fresh green beans for this dish. Frozen and canned varieties just don’t taste the same as fresh. I can easily find bagged trimmed green beans in my grocery store, but if you are able to get fresh green beans from a farmers market, or even loose green beans at the grocery store that you trim yourself, even better!

• Olive Oil: I like to use extra virgin olive oil in this dish because it adds a more complex flavor than a neutral oil like canola or avocado, but butter would also work here.

• Garlic Powder: Garlic powder is dehydrated and finely ground garlic cloves. It adds a mild garlicky flavor to the dish but is not as overpowering as using fresh garlic.

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Wondering how to make these green beans part of a complete meal? Consider serving them with my Salmon Sweet Potato Cakes recipe.

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