Let me start by stating that green beans are my favorite vegetable. That might be a little boring to some but I could seriously eat them every day. So I may be a little biased in my love for this recipe. I’d never made deep-fried green beans before but have ordered them in restaurants. They usually come with some sort of a dipping sauce at a restaurant but I didn’t miss having that with these green beans at all. If I was serving these to guests, I would probably have taken the time to make some sort of sauce. But trust me, it’s the green beans that will impress any guests….not a dipping sauce. They’re that good.
These do take a little bit of time to make because you can’t crowd them when cooking or they’ll stick together. I tried to sneak in a few more but quickly found out why you only do a dozen or so at a time. After each batch finished cooking and had drained for a few minutes on a paper towel, I moved them to a rack and placed them in my warming drawer. They stayed warm and didn’t lose their crunch while waiting for all of the beans to be cooked.
I did experiment with a few of the green beans and didn’t precook them. I coated the raw beans with the batter and continued cooking as normal. After tasting the beans cooked both ways, my personal preference was precooking and then plunging into an ice bath prior to deep frying as stated in the recipe.