Green Beans with Sesame Dressing by Tom

Green Beans with Sesame Dressing

(Ingen no goma joyu ae)

In an earlier post I referenced that I served green beans with the boiled pork.  This is all part of our journey through Japanese food.  Again like the boiled pork recipe, I found this recipe in the cookbook "Japanese Cooking Pure & Simple" by David Scott.

This was an easy recipe to make and the taste was excellent.  Really added additional flavors to the green beans.  Plan on about 30 minutes to make this dish.  You can do it concurrently with the boiled pork dish, or any other recipes.

    ---Tom

Green Beans with Sesame Dressing
(From "Japanese Cooking Pure & Simple" by David Scott)

Serves 4

2 cups chopped green beans (I used a small bag of Wegman's trimmed green beans that have been cleaned and cut.)
salt

Dressing
4 tablespoons white sesame seeds
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar

Cook the beans in lightly salted water for about 8 minutes until they are tender.  Drain and set aside.

In a small pan, roast the sesame seeds until they start to pop.  Be careful that you don't burn the seeds as this can happen very quickly.  (A time saving step is to purchase roasted white sesame seeds.)

With a pestle smash the sesame seeds to release their oil.  This will take some time and you will end up with a bit of a paste.  As you can see from the picture, not all of the sesame seeds will ultimately crush.

Add the soy sauce and the sugar to the mixture and stir well.

Transfer the green beans to a serving dish, and spoon the sesame dressing over the green beans.  Stir the green beans up to insure the sesame dressing gets on all of the green beans.  (I only used about half of the sesame dressing, as half seemed more than enough.  The rest I covered and refrigerated for use with another vegetable later on.)

I plated the green beans with the Japanese boiled pork and Japanese white rice.

A very good accompaniment to our Japanese dinner.

    ---Tom