Haricots Verts a l'Ail

Name: Haricots Verts a l'Ail
Total time: 10 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: Green beans; Olive oil; Garlic; Chicken stock; Salt; Black pepper

Haricots Verts a l'Ail, plated as one serving.

68 kcal a serving, against 142 for the traditional version. That is 74 kcal off, or 52%, with 3.3g of protein. Serves 4. 10 minutes.

What the traditional version is

A huge pile of topped and tailed green beans, boiled until just tender. They go straight into a hot frying pan where they meet 50g of butter and a handful of crushed garlic. The butter foams up, cooking the garlic slightly before coating every single bean in a thick, rich, glossy emulsion. It's delicious, but it leaves a massive puddle of grease at the bottom of the bowl.

What changed, and what each change costs

50g of butter down to 5g of olive oil

You need a tiny amount of fat just to stop the garlic instantly burning to the metal of the pan. Beyond that, the butter is entirely unnecessary for the actual cooking process. The beans are already cooked, so you're just trying to flavour them.

What it costs you. You lose that sweet, milky richness that butter brings to the party. The beans will taste noticeably sharper, a little less comforting, and much more aggressively garlicky.

Using chicken stock as a glaze

Without the butter, the garlic has nothing to carry it and just clumps up in the pan. A small splash of chicken stock hits the hot metal, reduces instantly and acts as a sticky vehicle to spread the garlic evenly over the beans.

What it costs you. It's no longer a vegetarian dish. If you want to keep it plant-based, use vegetable stock, though it lacks the natural gelatine that makes the chicken stock stick to the vegetables so well. You also miss out on the roasted flavour the chicken brings.

What goes in it

The ingredients, without the quantities. The weights are what the figures below are computed from, and they are in the book.

Green beans
Olive oil
Garlic
Chicken stock
Salt
Black pepper

How it starts

Bring a large pan of heavily salted water to a rolling boil.
Drain the beans immediately and leave them in the colander to steam dry for 1 minute.
Put a large frying pan over a medium heat.

The rest of the method, and every weight, is in Authentic-ish French.

The numbers

Per serving	Traditional	Lightened
Calories	142	68
Protein	3.1g	3.3g
Fat	10.5g	1.8g
Saturated fat	6.4g	0.3g
Carbohydrate	11.7g	12.3g
Protein per 100 kcal	2.2g	4.9g

Every figure is computed from the recipe's own weighed ingredient list against public food composition databases. The appendix in Authentic-ish French prints the exact database row used for each ingredient, so any number here can be checked. How every number is computed sets out the method.

The method is in the book

A sharp and intensely savoury plate of greens, then. Not a rich, buttery side dish, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The garlic hits you squarely in the face, and the chicken stock adds a salty background flavour that plain water simply can't provide. They're crunchy, bright and exactly what you need sitting next to a heavy piece of meat. You won't miss the butter at all, and your kitchen will smell phenomenal.

The quantities and the method for this dish are in Authentic-ish French, along with 54 more. Buy the paperback