summer

Quick Tip: How to Quickly Trim a Big Pile of Beans

Emma Christensen
Emma Christensen
Emma is a former editor for The Kitchn and a graduate of the Cambridge School for Culinary Arts. She is the author of True Brews and Brew Better Beer. Check out her website for more cooking stories
published Jul 19, 2010
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(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

Let’s face it: trimming green beans is a chore. Laboriously snipping the tops and tails off of each bean with a paring knife definitely gets old after a while. Particularly when you’ve still got most of the pile left to go. Here’s what we do to make the job go by a little more quickly.

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You can use a chef’s knife or a paring knife for this, whichever you feel more comfortable using. Start with just a few beans at once, and then you can work your way up to more as you feel comfortable.

1. Line Up the Beans – Use the edge of your knife or the side of your hand to line up a handful of beans on one side. (I’m right handed, so I line them up on the right.)

2. Trim Off the Tips – In one slice, cut off all the tips at once.

3. Repeat with the Other Side – Flip the beans around, line up the tips again, and trim off the other side.

Once you get into the rhythm of lining up the ends and trimming them off, prepping the beans goes by so much more quickly than doing each individual bean. You can also trim the other end without flipping (like in the last picture above), but the knife gets a little close to our fingers and we have a harder time holding the beans steady.

Do you have another method for trimming green beans?