Sweet/sour green beans with pecans

 On whole wheat Denver sourdough.

Such unpromising beginnings. 

Honestly, I did not expect much. 

Butter will do just fine to add satisfying depth to green beans.

Any vinegar will cut the oily butter and counterbalance it to produce a dressing.

Brown sugar creates a sweet / sour thing against the vinegar.

Salt and pepper, of course.

There is only a teaspoon of brown sugar but that ingredient changes everything. The balsamic is almost on the verge of being sweet already and the brown sugar pushes it over the edge. It is now sweet/sour battle with tang that cuts and counterbalances the rich but unctuous thud of unsalted butter. 

The bread is outstanding. Surely, it is bread +. You do not see bread like this for it is not marketed. Mankind is not ready for this bread. The bread itself is a bit vinegary, that is my complaint about it, but here that distinction is negated by the balsamic that completely overrides it with its own sweet/sour battle. The sauce-soaked bread tastes nothing like sourdough, nothing like wheat, more like meat, or perhaps close to portobello mushroom. I do not get the sense of sourdough at all, rather, a supremely excellent biscuit made specifically for thin sauce absorption. The bread changes as bread in bread pudding does. It becomes something else, a delicious sturdy whole wheat-sponge for sauce with no sense of sourdough, no sense of bread. 

The frozen beans produced more water than I would have cared to have but the bread soaked it all up. The bread takes up all the watery, buttery, aged-balsamicy, and brown sugary liquid.

You know what? I would serve this confidently any time, anywhere, for anybody. I would serve it without a trace of doubt to a table of 50 heads of state and 50 food critics and 50 children, and 50 panhandlers who are notoriously fussy eaters.