Gordon Ramsay's Green Bean Salad Includes A Sweetly Smoky Ingredient

Gordon Ramsay is one of the most prolific celebrity chefs, running award-winning restaurants, helping improve other restaurant owner's businesses, and sharing countless cooking tips with international audiences. He channels the elegance and skill of his own cooking into sophisticated recipes the average home chef can execute. A case in point is Ramsay's green bean salad recipe he recorded for his YouTube channel.

The green bean salad itself is nothing more than blanched green beans topped with crunchy almonds. But what makes this green bean salad stand out is the sweetly smoky roasted garlic chef Ramsay adds to the mustard vinaigrette. Where raw garlic cloves bring a spicy, savory bite to dressings, roasting mellows the spice by converting it into a caramelized sweetness with a smoky finish. You can try our simple oven-roasted garlic recipe that is an easy, hands-off method of preparation, allowing you plenty of time to prep and cook the green beans. Chef Ramsay roasts the whole head of garlic without slicing the top off like we do. Then, once the garlic is ready, he chops the top off and squeezes the golden garlic paste into a bowl as the foundation for a zingy mustard vinaigrette. It'll take a good 45 minutes to roast a head of garlic, so it should certainly be the first step you take in a green bean recipe. That said, the best way to roast garlic if you're short on time is to cook the cloves separately on a baking sheet, which can be done in as little as 15 minutes.

While Gordon Ramsay blended roasted garlic with dijon, olive oil, and vinegar into a rich vinaigrette dressing for green beans, roasted garlic's mellow sweet and smoky flavor will benefit a variety of sauces. We've got many green bean recipes to try chef Ramsay's roasted garlic hack on. Ramsay's recipe resembles our recipe for green bean almondine that swaps oil for butter and vinegar for lemon juice which we heat over the stove for a rich yet tangy sauce. You can easily squeeze a head of roasted garlic into the mix before tossing in blanched green beans and parmesan cheese.

Roasted garlic is a well-known seasoning upgrade to mashed potatoes, so it'll work especially well in this recipe for green bean potato salad. If chef Ramsay's recipe is any indication, the sweet and smoky garlic will pair perfectly with the mustard and honey vinaigrette we pour over the salad. Replace raw garlic cloves with a head of roasted garlic in this Ligurian pesto pasta with potatoes and green beans. Charring green beans is a great way to instill a novel texture and flavor in them. And the sweet caramelized notes of roasted garlic would be the perfect complement to the bitter char. You could whisk the roasted garlic with melted butter or olive oil to coat charred green beans. Another idea is to pair roasted garlic with miso paste, lime juice, and ginger for an Asian-inspired charred green bean salad dressing.