Do you love three-bean salad? If so, you're sure to also love four-bean salad or what I'm calling multi-bean salad. If you have a combination of green or wax beans and shelly beans (any kind), you can make a tasty batch of this dish quickly and easily. You can keep it in your fridge or process it in a water bath canner for long term storage.
Last week was so hectic that I wasn't able to keep up with harvesting. By the time the weekend rolled around I ended up with a small harvest of harvest of green beans, wax beans, and shelly beans - but not enough of any one kind to process a canner load. With that in mind, I set out to find a food preservation recipe that would allow me to use all the beans in a single recipe.
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Making & Canning Multi-Bean Salad
That quest led me to HealthyCanning.com's four-bean salad recipe, which is a definite winner that I'll be making time and time again. This recipe calls for green beans, wax beans, kidney beans, and chickpeas. Rather than being a four-bean salad, my version is more of a multi-bean salad.
I had the green beans and wax beans, along with a wide variety of shelly beans similar to kidney beans and chickpeas (scarlet runner, pinto, cranberry, cannellini, etc.).
Since the same canning instructions and times apply to all fresh shelled beans, I felt comfortable moving forward with the mixture of beans that I had.
Other than using multiple types of beans, the only other tweak I made to the recipe was to use Stevia instead of sugar, and to cut the amount of sweetener in half (sugar is not required for safety in this recipe).
I was able to can five pints and a half-pint in my NESCO/Carey electric pressure canner, which I like to use for small batch canning. I even had a bit extra to enjoy right away. I'm the only one in my house who will eat this, so this amount is easily a year's worth of this salad for me.
Great Way to Preserve Fresh Garden Beans
This pickled bean salad recipe is very easy to make, and it tastes great. It's very similar to the commercially canned bean salad that you can find in the supermarket, on salad bars, or in some restaurants. Rudy's Bar-B-Q has a similar salad on their menu; I order it any time I find myself in an area where they have a location. If you are looking for something to do with green beans and fresh shelly beans, I highly recommend this dish.
More Ideas for Preserving Beans?
If you have any more ideas for preserving relatively small bean harvests, I'd love to hear your suggestions! I already have more than enough plain (salted) green beans and dilly beans canned. I also made the mustard green beans from the Ball's Complete Book of Home Preserving, but I haven't tried them yet. I also have a lot of dehydrated green beans and wax beans, which I use in vegetable beef soup throughout the year. I look forward to your suggestions!
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