Easy fresh green beans with sesame seeds, garlic, and ginger seasoning is a healthy, vegan, pan-cooked, skillet baked string bean recipe to enjoy as an appetizer, snack, or side dish—that’s plant-based, refined oil-free, naturally gluten-free, and delicious!

Topped off with sesame seeds, this vegetarian and vegan green bean recipe gives you one amazingly healthy bite of goodness. These fancy looking green beans are perfect for serving as a holiday side dish. But as fancy as these beans may appear, they’re also easy enough to make any day of the week.

Once you mix the simple sauce, you only need one pan and these three ingredients. After you mix the sauce, just add beans, sesame seeds, and black pepper. You’ll love how so few ingredients it takes to make this healthy vegan, gluten-free and oil-free side or healthy appetizer!

So, without further ado, let’s get to the recipe details!

With this easy vegan and vegetarian recipe, you’ll learn how to prepare the best fresh green beans with simple garlic, ginger, and sesame seasonings.

Are Green Beans Healthy?

Fresh or even frozen green beans are healthy. And to me, string beans are even good for the soul, so to speak—though I may be a bit biassed.  Allow me to explain.

Making green beans shine like the rockstar veggies that they are is in my blood.

One of my favorite childhood memories is sitting beneath a massive tree in my Grandma’s yard in Tennessee, learning how to prep fresh string beans we’d just picked from her garden.

It was when we we came down from Illinois to visit our Tennessee family, that I got a chance to connect with food in a way that grocery shopping cannot replicate.

Those visits gave me a chance to get my hands dirty, sweat a bit, and most importantly, learn through experiences. I believe these visits are are part of the reason why as an adult, I recognize and appreciate the stories connected to the foods we enjoy.

So, to get back to the question, yes, green beans are a healthy and nutrient-dense food. 

Nutrient-dense means that string beans are low in calories and high in nutrients, both at the same time! Furthermore, green beans are an excellent vitamin K source—just one cup gives you about 155% of the daily value.

So, green beans are so much more than just an excellent, crispy, crunchy, low-calorie food—they provide many essential nutrients. Green beans are also an excellent source of vitamin C, dietary fiber, folate, and silicon. Silicon is vital to maintain healthy bones, skin, and hair.

Oil-Free Cooking is a Healthy Choice

People often ask why we choose to cook oil-free. It’s true that it adds another layer of challenge to cooking plant-based and gluten-free. But here’s the thing, any processed fat and calories you can trim from your plate, matter. Once you realize how much fat refined cooking oils add to food, it’s a no-brainer to want to skip it!.

Just one tablespoon of refined oil adds 120 calories to whatever you’re eating. And, by the way, it does not matter if the oil is extra virgin, organic, labeled as being lite. It also doesn’t matter if you spent a lot of money. Many oils considered as “the good stuff” are just as unhealthy as the cheap varieties of refined packaged cooking oils.

When it comes to refined oils, fat is fat no matter how pretty it’s packed!

That whopping number is why we choose to pan-cook using no oil and bake and broil and boil oil-free as well.

We readily admit that it does take some getting used to cooking oil-free. But whether it’s in this pan-cooked and baked string beans recipe or any of our other dishes, which are all oil-free, plant-based, and gluten-free, we know you’ll like what you taste!

Helpful Oil-Free Cooking Tips:

• After rinsing fresh vegetables to be cooked, you can skip drying them off when cooking oil-free. Leaving the vegetable wet provides moisture for cooking.
• To pan-cook oil-free on the stovetop, keep about a cup of water or veggie broth nearby if you happen to need to add some liquid to prevent your food from burning.
• When roasting a pan of vegetables without using oil, first, add the veggies to your baking dish, then very mist the veggies with a little water, very lightly to help any seasonings adhere.
• Let the sauce or dressing in a recipe serve as the moisture in the place of oil. That’s the method we use is this recipe for easy fresh green beans with seasonings of sesame, garlic, and ginger.

This is the Best Way to Cook Green Beans!

The best way to cook green beans is sautéed on the stovetop, or pan-cooked. Then the green beans and finished off under the broiler or baked to add a little savoriness and brown color. Some may wish to call this cooking method boiling since it is requires no cooking oil.

This way of cooking easy fresh green beans is something I have learned through trial and error. And now, after forcing myself to sample countless batches of crispy green beans at Ethos Vegan Kitchen I believe I have figured it out! (Big smile.)

The crispy green beans at Ethos taste delicious every time. And it’s not oil that makes them taste so good. Great taste is nearly always about the seasonings, in this case, it’s about sesame, ginger, and garlic. As a bonus, they make you feel a bit lofty, practically angelic even, for ordering such a clean and healthy appetizer.

I had never broiled much of anything in my home oven until I started testing out this recipe—now I’m a regular old broiling fool.

Here’s How to Cook Fresh Green Beans:

• First, rinse and trim the fresh green beans.
• Next, in a small bowl, whisk together all ingredients for the bean seasonings. The tahini is an essential part of the flavor profile in this fresh string bean recipe.  We nearly called this recipe tahini roasted green beans with sesame, garlic, and ginger but didn’t for fear of running out of room.
• Then, in a medium-sized skillet or another pan with a lid that’s oven safe, cook the beans in a pan on the stovetop until they’re slightly under the level of tenderness you prefer.
• Next, transfer the partially cooked beans to the oven and broil until the beans brown a bit.  
• Now, remove the pan-cooked and broiled or baked beans from the broiler. Sprinkle the beans with a few sesame seeds, and top with freshly ground black pepper. 

You will find complete step-by-step instructions in the Healthy Fresh Green Beans with Sesame Seeds recipe located at the end of this article.

How to Serve Vegan Green Beans

Since you make this crispy, crunchy, baked string beans recipe in the oven, they make a perfect healthy side dish! 

Pair this oil-free, garlic, ginger, and sesame seasoned beans recipe with your favorite veggie burger, like this one, for an easy dinner! DONE!

And of course, these green beans taste terrific with southern faves such as corn bread, and our healthy mashed potatoes and gravy, too!

Vegan and vegetarian green beans also make an excellent side to share at Thanksgiving or another holiday meal. We suggest using this recipe in place of something like a traditional green bean casserole for a healthier holiday side dish that’s vegan and gluten-free. 

We Hope You Enjoy this Vegan Recipe for Easy Fresh Pan-Cooked Green Beans!

Feel free to name this recipe however you like. If pan-cooking with the sauce and water is more like boiling than a sauté to you, that’s fine by us. Or if you want to call this a baked string beans recipe, well, that works, too!

And thanks to the beautiful seasonings, calling this dish Tahini Roasted Green Beans with Sesame, Garlic, and Ginger,  works too. After you try this recipe, you’ll see that Easy Fresh Green Beans with Sesame also fits like a glove.  

This fresh green bean recipe is a doable dish with delicious seasonings—so we’re excited to hear how you like it! Even the occasional cook can prepare this healthy green bean appetizer, snack, or side with success!  So, after giving this fresh green bean recipe a try, leave us a comment.

And if you’re all jazzed up about beans and in the mood for beans for dessert, try these amazing chickpea cookies or black bean brownies!

Happy Eating!