Transform Green Bean Casserole From Side Dish To Appetizer With Puff Pastry Sheets

One of the most exciting things about holiday gatherings is dazzling your friends and family with new interpretations of classic dishes. Adding blueberries to your cranberry sauce, soft pretzels to your stuffing, and horseradish to your mashed potatoes will wow them all. And one green bean casserole adaptation is even more dramatic when you transform it from large-format side to a finger food with little more than puff pastry and a bit of culinary architecture.

The classic, all-American green bean casserole beloved by many typically includes the titular green beans, cream of mushroom soup, a splash of milk, fried onions, and all manner of little extras and secret ingredients, depending on the household. That's all, of course, baked together into one, big dish. Deconstructing it means that you can serve green bean casserole bites on the main dinner table, or in advance as hors d'oeuvres. 

The construction of these savory apps will even be fairly familiar to anyone who's made or had a green bean casserole before. Having chopped the blanched green beans down to size, you'll stir the standard ingredients together, add any extras you wish (the canned soup giant Campbell's includes cheddar cheese), dollop the casserole mixture onto store-bought puff pastry portions prearranged in mini or standard muffin tins (depending on how big you want the bites), give the pastry's edges a brush of egg wash for a glossy sheen, and bake until golden. No muffin tin? No problem — you can also bake squares of casserole-topped puff pastry on a sheet pan. There are more tasty edits that you can incorporate from there.

Anyone who's ever had a "two bite" this or that will understand that these petite green bean casserole bites provide scant space to work with, but there's still a whole lot of flavor to potentially pack in. That flavor just has to fit inside the roughly 2-by-2-inch squares of thawed puff pastry that you've draped into the muffin tin cups. A tangle of caramelized onions and Gruyère combined with your green bean base will give the bites a bit of the French onion soup treatment that you'll find in one of our other green bean casserole riffs. Swapping in some chopped mushrooms, as well, can give the bites more of an umami burst than you'd get from the soup alone.

You can also make a more savory green bean casserole bite with a bit of the sausage that some folks like to use to bulk up their stuffing. You'll just want to make sure that it's nice and crumbly to fit into the puff pastry cups. Some chopped pancetta or bacon can have a similar effect. You could even swap the green beans with some thinly sliced asparagus to really impress. Green bean casserole is most obviously associated with celebrations like Thanksgiving, but these little switcharoos make it even more conducive to any time of year. Just make sure that your usual crew can handle such a transformation of the typical green bean casserole.