Zeamă de păstăi

Vegetarian runner bean soup. How to buy runner beans. Menu ideas.

This dish comes together in a jiffy, so the runner beans don’t have time to become soft and soggy, but stay al dente and retain a good colour. It is fantastic served with a chunk of homemade white bread or freshly baked bread from a quality bakery.

Runner beans are easy to grow, and when picked young, they are juicy and crisp. If you allow them to grow too large, they will become stringy and you will have to use a vegetable peeler to remove them. Sorry, what? Ah…I thought I heard you saying ‘life’s too short’. I don’t mind the strings now, but when I was little (and a princess), if I found a string in my pod, I would refuse to eat the dish. I’d sooner have gone hungry. It was, of course, easier to stick to principles when I was not the cook and didn’t spend 10 hours at work and had 10 minutes to shop at the market before it closed. So I got over it eventually.

In Romania, runner beans are called păstăi de fasole, bean pods, and they are often a yellow variety.

Păstăi are usually fresh, even though in Transylvania, people also dry them in the heat of the summer, to use later in soups. Perhaps that is a story for the ‘life’s-too-short’ statement because you'll have to string them together in long necklaces by pushing a needle and thread through each pod and hang them on two nails in a sunny spot outside the barn.

But I don’t grow runner beans in the garden, so I buy them at the market. I find them loose on the tables at farmers' markets, and I can test whether they are stringy or not. I pick one and snap it in half. The sound is crisp, and the halves snap instantly without an umbilical cord to keep them attached. At this moment, I know I’ve found myself the perfect runner beans.

Stringless?

However, nowadays, there are varieties of ’stringless runner beans’, which I never knew existed. Just like I never understood how we could have seedless grapes and watermelons, or ‘easy-peelers’ citrus fruit. They have all the qualities for a good peeling, cooking and eating experience but no flavour. There is nothing to get stuck in your teeth, under your fingernails or, indeed, in your memory.

The recipe: Zeamă de păstăi

A ‘zeamă’ or ‘ciorbă’ in Romania is a clear soup with a sour element added at the end of the cooking time. I wrote all about it in a previous post here.

Ingredients:

2 medium size brown onions, sliced

1 medium size carrot, peeled and grated

1L vegetable stock

500g stringless runner beans, cut into 2cm pieces

75g sour cream

1 egg yolk

2 small garlic cloves, grated

20g chopped dill, fennel or parsley

Method:

Heat a thin layer of sunflower oil on the base of a soup or casserole dish. Add the onions and carrot, a generous pinch of salt, and cook on medium heat for 10-12 minutes until they start to caramelise. Pour the stock in and bring to the boil, then add the runner beans. Cook on medium heat for 8 minutes, until the beans start to soften but retain some firmness. Turn the heat off. In a bowl, mix the sour cream, egg yolk and garlic. Pour over a couple of spoonfuls of the soup and combine well, then repeat 2 more times. This will bring the sour cream closer to the temperature of the soup, and it won’t split. Now pour the sour cream mixture into the soup and stir well. Taste and adjust the seasoning (I always feel it needs more salt at this stage, but it depends on the stock) Add the herbs and serve immediately.

An idea: make a runner bean stew, mâncare de păstăi

Follow the recipe above but reduce the amount of stock to just about cover the beans. Add a tablespoon of tomato paste and plain flour to the sour cream mixture, skipping the egg yolk, and stir it in at the end of the cooking time. You can also add some fried smoked lardons.

Sour cream bonus

If you like sour cream as much as we do in Eastern Europe, then you’ll love this refreshing cucumber and lettuce salad with dill (or fennel): slice cucumber and lettuce finely, mix with salt and allow to sit for 10 minutes. Drain the water, and add sour cream and herbs (or only dill).

I also love cucumbers with mici, these little stars of the Romanian BBQ I wrote about here.

Menu idea: if you decide to make Zeamă de păstăi, followed by a main course with Mici and Cucumber salad, I recommend a summer rice pudding with apricots, served cold. You won’t believe how refreshing it is. See the idea here.

Culinary Tour in Transylvania

Photo credit Matt Russell for Tava

Keep an eye on my social media this September (Insta, Threads, FB, X) when I’m taking a group to Transylvania to eat traditional dishes, visit Saxon churches, eat again, bake, go for walks, eat once more, drink, have a picnic, and generally, have a fab time…eating. Send me an email (irina.r.georgescu@gmail.com) if you’d like to join us next year, so I can include you on the waiting list.