“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, Leonardo da Vinci used to say
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 2 € pp)
- Salt
- 600 g green beans
- 6 very small potatoes
- Coarse salt
- The zest of one lemon
- Fresh parsley
- EV sunflower oil for frying
- Allioli sauce made of:
- 2 garlic cloves
- 1 egg yolk
- The juice of one lemon
- 100 ml EV olive oil
- 100 ml EV sunflower oil
The frequent readers of Democratic Gourmet may already know my obsession with allioli sauce. This sauce has something magic inside it, it turns a dish from boring to very very tasty.
Allioli sauce is primarily (but not always) used for everyday dishes with not expensive ingredients. Actually, it is an umami- amplifier for dishes of vegetables or starch containing products, such as rice and potatoes.
What else could we do to make a simple humble dish, made of vegetables, tastier? someone might ask.
We can “play” with the textures by making some ingredients softer (turning them to purée) or crunchier (frying or roasting them) or by adding to them, preparations such as breadcrumbs or fried cold cuts.
Enough with the theory, let’s proceed to our dish.
We prepare the allioli sauce, if we don´t have some made in advance. If you don´t remember how to prepare it, I remind you that using the immersion blender we beat the garlic cloves with a little bit of salt, the egg yolk and the lemon juice and then we start adding 100 ml of EV sunflower oil and the olive oil till, creating an emulsion. That´s all.
We bring plenty of salted water to boil and we start boiling the green beans in batches for about 7 minutes. When ready, we pass them for a minute or two from a wok in order to remove the excessive humidity and make them tastier. We keep aside.
We lower the temperature of the water and we add the potatoes, not peeled. We simmer them till tender. We pat them dry and we fry them in EV sunflower oil (190 Celsius degrees).
Our dish is ready. We put on the plates the green beans, the fried potatoes and we finish with a tablespoon or more of allioli sauce, coarse salt, chopped parsley and the lemon zest.
