Most people live in fear of overcooking their vegetables. And no wonder—the great majority of us grew up eating soggy overcooked Brussels sprouts, olive-green broccoli with no more backbone than a piece of spaghetti. It's no wonder that, now that we're fully grown adults, we've seized control of our vegetable fate and simply blanch our green beans until they're just bright-green and crisp-tender.
But in our eagerness to overthrow the haunting memories of vegetables past, have we gone too far? When green beans taste more like freshly-mown grass than food, and their texture is more squeaky-snap than chewable, we're not cooking them any more. We're undercooking them.
Even worse, these undercooked vegetables have such a "green" flavor, we need to drown them in sauce to make them taste decent. And that means that those bright and crunchy vegetables end up tasting way less like themselves than the properly cooked kind.
Don't believe me? No less a cooking authority than the dearly departed Marcella Hazan agrees with me. In her own words:
"Let me tell you: When I was teaching, let's say that I was cooking some string beans and they were in the boiling water and people would say, "Marcella, they must be cooked." So I said, "Let's taste it," and I took it out and they were crunchy. And they said, "They are cooked now." I said: "Yes? Do you taste the string beans? Let's see what happens if we cook it a little longer." After a little longer, they were not mushy at all but they were cooked. And they said, oh, now they are different, they are really string beans." Cooking brings out the taste. If you cook vegetables too little because you want them crunchy, they all have one thing in common: They taste like grass."
So the next time you're boiling green beans, take a moment to taste one before declaring them cooked. If they taste more like grass than vegetable, give them another minute or two in the pot. Same thing for any other vegetable you're eating cooked. Or go full force and char them on the grill or roast them until they're just starting to shrivel. You might just find you love them even more than you did a day (or a lifetime) ago.
