Make Your Green Bean Casserole Exciting With This One-Ingredient Upgrade

After countless times of showing up dressed in the same few ingredients, even something as comforting and nostalgic as a green bean casserole can get boring. Green beans, especially, can be a tricky vegetable. Left alone, their earthy taste borderlines on blandness. Buried underneath too many condiments and spices, they lose their core flavor entirely. What you need is something that walks the line between the two impeccably, just balanced enough to revamp your casserole without altering its beloved essence. Unexpectedly, of the many creative ways to spice up green bean casseroles, it's miso paste that might surprise you the most.

Miso is the one-ingredient upgrade that does it all. It brings with it the soybeans' nutty undertone, deepened into an umami funk created during the fermentation process. Somewhere in between all of that, you might even spot a note of sweetness. At first taste, it's something that subtly blends into the ingredients and inexplicably makes the dish taste fuller. The green beans are richer, the sauce more dramatic, and the mushrooms become more than just a textural filler with that savory boost. Every forkful afterward continues building up those flavors, all the way until the plates are cleared and your craving for big, warm flavors is completely sated.

There are three types of miso, and white miso is your best bet in this case. It's the lightest in intensity, and therefore least likely to overwhelm the dish or clash with heavier ingredients. Even so, a little still goes a long way, so start by mixing only one tablespoon into the sauce, and adjust — one teaspoon at a time — until you get the desired potency.

Beyond that, there's no set rule for what you can add miso to. Perhaps you'd make a tangy white roux or a simple butter sauce that enriches the dish's undertone. Coconut milk and coconut cream, abundant with sweetness, could also help bring out the paste's underlying sweet hints. Simmering in the pan with the miso paste, soy sauce (or Worcestershire sauce) delivers one umami punch after another. You can even roast the onion separately and then stir the drippings into the sauce to blend the peppery aroma into the miso's savory depth.

Since miso is already there, you can always utilize other Japanese staples as well. Try swapping button mushrooms for shiitake mushrooms, or sprinkle toasted sesame seeds and sliced scallions over the dish instead of the usual fried onions. Rather than using chicken broth to ground the sauce, dashi soup powder could make for quite an interesting base. And hey, drop a few edamame in while you're at it for fun pops of colors.