Today’s preservation is going to be on a crop you might not have much familiarity with. Runner beans are far more common to find grown as food in European gardens than North American ones, which tend to treat this crop as ornamental. Nonetheless, they are a robust and prolific crop when grown in subarctic soils and thus we find them valuable to grow!
Runner beans go by several names, sometimes called Scarlet Runner, butter bean, elephant bean or even Oregon lima bean. The pods of the beans are at best divisive, with some preferring to shell the beans and only eat their sweeter seeds. In warmer climates, they can be vine dried and shelled to use as a dried bean. We find the lightly fibrous texture of the pod just fine, especially when they are well cooked down in soups, stews and other dishes. You have flexibility in you prepare and eat them.
Though not wildly popular among the typical American palette, runner beans are found in many cultural dishes outside of the US. In Britain, it’s not uncommon for runner beans to be served as a side dish. One of our favorite preparations is meat based stews where these beans contribute an earthy and lovely bean flavor.
When we say this crop is prolific, we mean it. In practically every season, we get massive beans that sometimes push a foot in length or more. Though we do see slightly reduced production in cooler summers, we find the crop tolerant to even moderately cool weather. We find few beans tolerant of subarctic soils, but this one’s a major exception.
To give you a sense of harvest scale, that bowl is extremely large, taking up a good portion of space on top of our refrigerator. I think it’s 20 quarts and we find it exceptionally useful to deal with large quantities of food during the harvest season. That bowl was practically filled by just a 10 foot row of runner beans, maybe 30-35 plants! They seriously pack on the pounds!
We typically preserve these beans using blanch and freeze techniques. We pack them into two cup bags as this is often the amount we’ll toss into various things we’d make with these beans. Some people do prefer to soak the beans to dampen the fibrous pods, which you can still do when they are preserved this way.
We’re always finding new and different ways to use runner beans throughout the winter months. We enjoy the fact that our sometimes more obscure growing practices give us less common ingredients that we can use to flavor and enhance our cooking!
