French Green Beans With Shallots Recipe

This recipe for French Green Beans with Shallots is a super simple addition to your dinner menu, whether you’re cooking at home or hosting a dinner party. This dish is beautiful when plated and looks far more impressive and complicated than it really it.

Plus, you can find these green beans in a lot of areas all year round. I really love them during the summer and think they’re the perfect addition for our summertime dinner party menu!

In case you haven’t read about it yet, I’ve put together a summertime dinner menu for you that is complete from drinks to appetizers through dessert. I’ve taken all of the guess work out of menu planning so you can just print the recipe cards and head straight to the grocery store!

Let’s jump in!

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1. Gather Ingredients: French Green Beans and Shallots

Ingredients you will need:

• 1-1 1/2 pds haricot verts or French green beans
• 3 tbsp unsalted butter
• 1 tbsp EVOO
• 3-4 shallots, sliced

DID YOU KNOW: Another name for “French Green Beans” is “Harricot Verts”.

Haricot vert is the French term for one of the long, slender green beans. “Haricot” means bean and “vert” means green in French.

Haricots verts are longer and thinner than American green bean varieties and tend to be more tender and have a more robust flavor.

2. Prep Green Beans and Shallots

Wash the green beans and peal the shallots, if needed. Remove the ends of the string beans and cut the shallots into large slices.

3. Blanch Green Beans

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and blanch the beans for about 1 1/2 minutes. Make sure not to over do them or else they’ll get mushy.

Drain immediately and immerse in a bowl of ice water.

BLANCHING: What Is It & Why Do We Do It?

To blanch, food is briefly immersed in boiling water (often just a minute or two), followed by an ice bath to rapidly cool off the food.

When a food is blanched properly, the flavor, color, texture, and nutritional value is preserved.

Blanching gently softens the outside of the food while keeping the interior crisp, sweetens the produce a little, and causes the vegetable to hold its color for a longer period of time.

4. Sauté

Heat the butter and oil in a large sauce or sauté pan and sauté the shallots on medium heat for 5 to 10 minutes, tossing occasionally, until lightly browned.

Drain the beans and add them to the sauté pan with the shallots. Salt and pepper to taste. Only heat the beans until they are warm.

THEN, serve immediately! As I said above, this recipe is really quite simple and adds a lot of flavor and color for much less effort. That is why I added them to our pre-made summertime dinner menu HERE.

We tend to keep our summer veggie recipes pretty simple so the vegetables shine. Do you have any go-to summer veggie recipes? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!