Chinese Style Dry Fried Garlic Green Beans

These Chinese style, dry fried garlic green beans are blistered until perfectly wrinkled & sautéed with lots of garlic. Inspired by Din Tai Fung green beans. The perfect Asian side dish!

Many times I've gone to restaurants and ordered these Chinese style, dry fried garlic green beans. They're blistered until perfectly wrinkled, bright green with a crunchy texture, and loaded with garlic flavor. Such a simple dish but lots of flavor. I had to figure out how to make these and finally figured it out after a few tries! I modeled these after Din Tai Fung green beans so kept the flavors and seasoning similar to the restaurant version.

This is a four ingredient recipe that's ready in under 15 minutes. It's super versatile as you can add spices and other seasonings to change up the flavor.

There are many other varieties of Chinese style garlic green beans but I kept it simple with just garlic and salt. Feel free to add some spicy Szechuan chili oil to spice things up.

Try out this Din Tai Fung Inspired Crunchy Asian Cucumber Salad:

Or check out these Din Tai Fung Stir Fried Shanghai Rice Cakes:

Tips for Chinese Style, Dry Fried Garlic Green Beans

Start by trimming the ends of your green beans and cut them in half. You have the option to blanch the green beans before you start dry frying them or you can leave them raw and add them directly to the hot oil. See more on this below.

What is Blanching?

• Blanching is adding vegetables to boiling water for a brief amount of time and then immediately putting them in an ice water bath to stop the cooking process. What you end up with is brightly colored vegetables that are tender but still crisp.

To Blanch or Not To Blanch the Green Beans:

The following is a comparison of dry fried green beans with blanched and unblanched green beans. (Yes, I may have gone a bit overboard when recipe testing.)

You can see the blanched green beans are a nice bright green color compared to the blanched green beans. They are also just slightly more tender than the raw counterpart.

When dry frying both the blanched and unblanched green beans, they both blister and wrinkle, and they are both bright green.  But there's a subtle difference to their surface texture as you can see below:

Din Tai Fung Green Beans

If you're going for Din Tai Fung green beans, I recommend blanching the green beans as you'll get that characteristic wrinkled, blistered look to the green beans.

Below, on the left is the blanched dry fried green bean. On the right is the unblanced (raw) dry fried green bean. They're are both similar in color but the wrinkles/blisters are slightly different.

• The blanched green bean produces smaller, more uniform blisters. Most similar to Din Tai Fung green beans.
• The unblanched green beans produces larger, more variable blisters.

It's entire up to you if it's worth the extra step but in the end, the flavor and crunchiness of the green beans were practically undistinguishable. 

Dry Fried Garlic Green Beans

What is Dry Frying?

Dry frying is frying your vegetable or protein in oil without any batter, resulting in drying the surface of your food. You want to make sure there's enough oil in your pan to submerge your food and to use an oil with a high smoke point. I used avocado oil and it works great.

You can see the texture of the green beans are wrinkled and blistered from dry frying. But they are still crunchy.

Next you want to briefly saute the green beans with a lot of garlic.

Be sure not to over saute your green beans with the garlic otherwise, you'll lose the crunchy texture. Finish with salt to taste and you're done!

This recipe was inspired by Din Tai Fung green beans so the seasoning is very similar to that -- just salt and garlic. If you want to add more seasoning and spices, you can add them when sauteing the garlic.

These Chinese style garlic green beans is all about the wrinkled skin and crunchy texture. They should be crispy and crunchy with perfectly blistered skin. They also make the perfect Asian side dish! Serve with a these Din Tai Fung Crunchy Asian Cucumber Salad.

I hope you make these Chinese style, dry fried garlic green beans! Please share, rate, and comment below. I’d love to hear from you!

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