French Beans recipes

A fast, high-heat stir-fry where French beans stay beautifully crisp-tender and soak up a punchy sesame and soy sauce. Crispy tofu adds satisfying bite, and the whole thing comes together in under 25 minutes. Serve over steamed rice for a genuinely easy weeknight supper.

A South Indian-inspired dry curry where French beans are cooked until just tender in a fragrant base of mustard seeds, curry leaves, fresh ginger and coconut. This is not a thick sauce curry — the beans stay the focus, coated in spiced oil and finished with toasted coconut for a dish that's deeply savoury and genuinely satisfying. Eat it alongside rice or flatbreads.

This is a proper warm salad — the kind you eat with a fork and a hunk of bread to mop up the glossy, paprika-stained juices. French beans are the backbone here, cooked until just tender and tossed with sliced cooking chorizo while both are still warm, so the beans soak up the orange oil. A soft-boiled egg and a scattering of crunchy smoked paprika breadcrumbs finish it beautifully.

A proper niçoise built around a generous pile of garden-fresh French beans rather than the tuna-heavy versions you see in restaurants. Waxy new potatoes, jammy soft-boiled eggs, briny olives and a sharp anchovy-mustard dressing tie everything together. This is the kind of salad that actually fills you up.