Here's how to prepare them properly

Buy wax beans

When buying fresh beans, regardless of whether they are yellow or green, make sure that the vegetables are crisp. The colors are bright green or yellow, the pods have no brown spots or squishy bruises. Take a bean and break it through. At the break point, small droplets must emerge from the meat, which guarantee that the bean is fresh.

Clean the wax beans

If you have bought or harvested a large number of beans, leave the legumes in a cool room until they are ready. Just before further processing, wash the beans under running water and cut off the ends. With some types of beans, the central threads also have to be removed.

Preserve wax beans

Wax beans can be kept in the refrigerator for up to three days if wrapped in a damp kitchen towel. Then they should be prepared and consumed at the latest.
Large amounts of legumes are best used for stockpiling. There are two ways to do this:

• reduce the wax beans in glasses or
• Freeze the wax beans.

The boiling down

Boiling down beans, including wax beans, was the specialty of the older generation. The clean beans were divided into bite-sized pieces, poured into mason jars, doused with salt water and hermetically sealed and boiled in a large kettle. Treated in this way, the beans could be kept for years.

The freezing

Freezing vegetables is simple and modern. With just a few steps, you can store an entire bean harvest in the freezer to save space.

1. Clean the wax beans and cut them to the size you want.
2. Prepare salted boiling water in a large saucepan.
3. Put the beans in the boiling salted water for a few minutes.
4. Pour off the salt water and immediately add the beans to ice water. This is how they keep their color.

You can now freeze the blanched beans in portions in suitable freezer containers. Wax beans last about a year in the freezer. If you want to process the frozen beans further, it is not necessary to defrost them beforehand.