Hmm. I actually like canned green beans. I mean, I like fresh ones better, but after heating up thousands of cans of green beans over an open fire on camping/hunting trips, I sort of had the taste of them grow on me. Some warm, soft beans with chunks of canadian bacon in with the beans just brings me back to good times. I know, strange. [Reply]
Originally Posted by tooge:
Hmm. I actually like canned green beans. I mean, I like fresh ones better, but after heating up thousands of cans of green beans over an open fire on camping/hunting trips, I sort of had the taste of them grow on me. Some warm, soft beans with chunks of canadian bacon in with the beans just brings me back to good times. I know, strange.
Dad served in Korea during Vietnam and ate green beans every day. So never had green beans growing up. Mom hated peas so didn't have those either until I moved out. My roommate always got canned of both so that's what I'm used to.
Although now I go to the farmers market and buy snap peas and love them. Fresh green beans, not so much I guess. [Reply]
Originally Posted by tooge:
Hmm. I actually like canned green beans. I mean, I like fresh ones better, but after heating up thousands of cans of green beans over an open fire on camping/hunting trips, I sort of had the taste of them grow on me. Some warm, soft beans with chunks of canadian bacon in with the beans just brings me back to good times. I know, strange.
Throw a slice of bacon in the bottom of a small sauce pan (maybe two; enough to cover the bottom when raw), about a 1/2 cup of diced onion and a couple of garlic cloves to the top. Put on medium-high until you have to turn the bacon, then just give it a couple quick tosses and leave it on medium high for another couple of minutes while the bacon, garlic and onions kinda meld and the onions/garlic brown a little.
Take a can of green beans and dump about 1/2 the juice out (in a cup, just in case you want to add it back in). Put the rest on the pot with the bacon, etc... Add juice as your pot requires, I like to just cover everything.
Set to a slow boil, cover and cook for 1/2 an hour. Then take the lid off and cook until the moisture is gone. If you're on a time crunch, skip the cover and you can knock the whole thing out in 20 minutes.
Easily my favorite green beans and they come from a can. [Reply]
The only problem I've run into is that I have a hard time getting the dome temp up quite as high as I'd like without making the bottom too hot. I think the answer would be just a shitload of lump charcoal around the edges making sure that there's no direct heat on the stone but rather high enough convection above it that it eventually heats on its own. You need real lump charcoal for the BTUs but it burns so fast that it takes a lot of tendering. Maybe just fill that back basket with a shitload of good quality lump as a compromise. Trying to get underneath it while it cooks is just so damn hard that I always use briquettes down there b/c of the long cook time.
What I've done recently is cheat a little bit. I'll launch my pizza, rotate it for a bit to get the leopard spotting, then I'll grab my metal 'retrieval' peel, pull the pizza and set my grill scraper underneath it; one of these cheap, shitty things (I'm pretty sure an in-law got me that thing at some point):
There's no real surface area in contact with the stone or the peel at that point so you have no more conductive heat from the bottom passing through the peel. It's all just radiant/convection heat. And when the peel has been out of the grill, it's cool enough to by a lot of time.
By raising the top of the pizza near the top of the baking steel that has all that heat trapped in it due to thermal mass, it essentially acts as a broiler that browns/crisps anything on top that hasn't gotten where you want it without burning the bottom. You can rest the handle of the scraper and peel on the lip of the kettle pizza and it keeps everything nice and level. If you try it, you'll see what I mean.
It's a work around for when you don't have your oven dialed in exactly right but it's a pretty bulletproof method.