What salad comes to mind that means it's summer, or you're going on a (properly-distanced) picnic?
If you're following a low-carb food plan, potato salad, probably ranked No. 1, is now on your nope-can't-have-it list.
There is a salad that has been a summertime favorite for a long time: three-bean salad. It's an oldie, for sure. Ask different people how they make a three-bean salad and you may come away with a wide assortment of answers.
The classic is green beans, yellow (wax) beans, and kidney beans. A quick web search came up with a three-bean salad named "classic" that had cannellini beans, kidney beans, and garbanzo beans. Interesting, but far, far from "classic."
I used to make my three-bean salad with fresh green and wax beans that I blanched and chilled. That's a time-consuming step and it's gotten harder to find fresh wax beans these days. So canned beans, which was the "classic" version, simplifies the process.
I did a web search to see if I could learn three-bean salad's provenance and found lots of references to "grandmother," but no definite historic link to the first salad.
I'm going to take a stab at it and guess that the first three-bean salad recipe was invented by a vegetable canning company to sell three cans of its vegetables, instead of one.
Also, there's a long list of possible additions to the classic, including adding more and different beans (garbanzo's popular) and fresh veggies, like julienne carrots, and chopped sweet pepper. Some even kick the heat up a notch with jalapeño pepper.
Since three-bean salads are dressed with a sweet and sour dressing using a vinegar base, there are many kinds of vinegar I could use including distilled white vinegar, red wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, cider vinegar, and sherry vinegar. For those that may want to go fancy, champagne vinegar. Or to sweeten it up a bit, balsamic vinegar works.
In all the three-bean salad recipes I saw the "always" ingredient was onion, specifically red onion. To recreate a "classic," I went with red onion. Garlic wasn't used in those salads, but I believed that the addition of fresh garlic tamed (along with the onions) by a simmer in vinegar added more flavor.
Three-bean salad recipes add sugar; some as much as a cup. If I were using sugar in my salad it would be a ¼-cup, delivering nearly 200 calories and 50 carb grams (all from that added sugar). For me, stevia works well as a sugar substitute. Using stevia, or any non-artificial sugar substitute, waves goodbye to those extra calories and carbs.
We had my three-bean salad as a side with dinner that included line-caught salmon (not farmed) and sat out on our screened porch on a mild summer evening. My "classic" was indistinguishable from the one I used to make, and it also complimented the salmon. Give it a try.
• Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write to him at don@ theleanwizard.com.
August 12, 2020 at 06:04PM
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Where does 3-bean salad rank on summer salad survey - Chicago Daily Herald
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