Author Notes
The heavy lifting part here comes with making the romesco, which is actually easy but requires attention. You will need some dried peppers; which could mean ancho, cascobel, guajillo or all or some in combination. Just mind your Scoville units which should be on the package. A romesco is not a "set your mouth on fire" sauce. You will soak the peppers and stem and seed them. Downhill from here. - pierino —pierino
Test Kitchen Notes
The Romesco sauce is amazing. (I could only get dried chipotle peppers so I used one and a roasted red bell pepper, which turned out to be a good decision. It was pretty hot.) I had grilled some fish also and we were layering it all over the fish as well as eating it with the green beans. (You really didn't want to be on the bike next to me in spin class the next morning!) Grilling the onions was also really great -- we loved the smoky sweetness and will do that again and again. Pierino suggests blanching the green beans but I recommend that they be sauteed or also grilled with the onions -- to bring out their sweetness. - drbabs —The Editors
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Ingredients
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2 or 4
dried peppers, your choice
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2
slices stale, crusty bread
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3/4
cup, light Spanish olive oile
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3-4 ounces
marcona almonds
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1 tbs
sherry vinegar
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4
cloves garlic peeled, and coarse chopped
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sea salt
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1/2 pound
fresh picked or from the market, green beans
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spring onions, ramps or calcots
Directions
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Start your fire if you are cooking outside.
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For your romesco, cut the tops off of the peppers which you have soaked for about two hours. Seed them and cut them roughly.
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Lightly toast the almonds. You can do this on the stovetop or in a sheet pan in the oven. I told you this was easy.
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Cut up your dried out bread into cubes, and then chop the garlic.
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Breathe deeply, this is not that hard
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Place above ingredients in your food processor, and drizzle in olive oil and vinegar. Hit this with sea salt and give it a spanking. There's your sauce.
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Blanche your green beans in boiling water for perhaps two minutes and plunge into cold water to set color. Drain.
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If you are using spring onions or calcots, give them a quick fire treatment on either a wood grill or an inside grill pan. You'll want some blackness on them.
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This should all be close to room temperature at the end. Plate the beans and onions with romesco on the side. There you go. You can do this, right? Just taste for salt and pepper at the end.
Standup commis flâneur, and food historian. Pierino's background is in Italian and Spanish cooking but of late he's focused on frozen desserts. He is now finishing his cookbook, MALAVIDA! Can it get worse? Yes, it can. Visit the Malavida Brass Knuckle cooking page at Facebook and your posts are welcome there.
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