How To Cook Green Beans

One little chef's tip here. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to add some salt to my water and what that does is it oxidises the water and it raises the temperature so at the end of the day, I want my beans in the pan straight out. Some salt in there.

Boiling water and it's all about preparation with anything you do in the kitchen. When it comes to food, just get everything ready so when I cook my beans, cook them for about one minute, take them out and I'm going to refresh them. Refresh means literally run them in cold water and stop the cooking process.

I've got my French beans. My pan is ferociously boiling now, straight in there. Like with any green vegetable or the majority of green vegetables, it's good to cook them in boiling water, it keeps the colour, it keeps the freshness as well, so I mean if you're cooking in cold water, you're going to lose a lot of colour, it will absorb a lot of water, you're not going to get good results - lovely colour, nice and bright green.

I'll just try one now. We're looking for a nice sort of crispy bite, al dente, soft to the tooth, nice and crispy, that's what we're looking for. I'm happy with that because what I'm going to do is take them out into my cold water.

Again, this is called refreshing our vegetables. But if you were to serve your vegetables straight away, then literally straight out of the pan and straight onto the table. But in a restaurant, like in the big kitchens, we are refreshing them and these are ready to go.

I've stopped the cooking process, they're nice and green and they're nice and crispy. I'll just take my pan off there. So if I had an order on for French beans, a nice little chef's tip here, in a pan, a few shallots or a few almonds, a bit of olive oil and butter sat in there and slowly reheat them through.

Obviously, I want to keep it simple. Put some boiling water back on and literally put them back in there and bring them up to temperature. And that's how I cook my French beans.

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