Aura Bora

Green Bean Casserole

We are officially back on our bullshit! We apologize for the egregious hiatus. It was wrong of us, bubblenauts, and we missed you.

Since we last spoke, Ugly has disappeared into the night, never to be heard from again, San Pellegrino Coffee Essenzas limped off in defeat, as if they never existed, and small brands like Chirp only exist in memory on the ‘gram.

We’re started to believe the Golden Age of Sparkling Water is starting to wane like the crumbling of empire, but then lo and behold, Aura Bora teased our socials with an offering so wild and madcap, we just might have believed we are actually still living in the best of times, as if Coconut LaCroix could still be found at Whole Foods.

Few things evoke an immediate gag reflex in us faster than the words “Green Bean Casserole”. Now maybe this is because we’ve never seen a GBC without the worst food known to mankind: canned green beans.

We truly can’t believe canned green beans are a real thing, nor that they were our first impression of what a green bean ostensibly is. The memory of slimy canned green beans slithering down our resistant young throats, barely able to choke it down haunts us to this day. Memories of trying to surreptitiously spit them out in the bathroom or wadding it up in napkins were where we learned acts of resistance, subversion, refusing to be subjected to what no human should be subjected to.

Thus by extension, Green Bean Casserole as a dish should not exist, so when we confirmed that Aura Bora wasn’t spoofing us with some holiday trickery, we immediately set an iPhone reminder so we didn’t miss out on this potential sparkling water fiasco. We were so passionate about this liquid GCB that we geared up our reminder for *the day before* the launch. There was no way we were missing this.

Truly, canned green beans were so horrific to our delicate childhood tongues, we didn’t even realize we liked green beans at all until much later in life, when reluctantly encountering a living one from a garden. Crisp, almost overwhelming in dewy freshness. How are canned green beans the same plant?

Like so many bad American culinary ideas, this one came straight out of the 1950s, conjured into existence by one Dorcas Reilly, who may have been destined to make a dish so horrifying after being gifted with a name that sounds like our childhood bully would give us on the bus ride home from Cedar Hill Elementary.

Under “fun facts” on the Campbell’s Soup website, one of the “fun” tidbits is that their Green Bean Casserole recipe is viewed four million times every Thanksgiving Day.

Four million.

That means four million of you are holding your family hostage every year. I realize we all carry around some family trauma, but wow, who hurt you?

But it gets worse. And we hope this “fact” is a joke or at the very least outdated. But apparently while four million of you are looking at it, twenty million of you are serving this dish every year. (Which also means sixteen million of you have this recipe memorized???)

We know the US is a f*cked up place, but this isn’t helping, y’all.

We couldn’t wait to see what kind of Thanksgiving PTSD Aura Bora was going to throw at us!

Our cans arrived quickly, and we couldn’t have been more excited to dive right in. The nose on this one is disturbingly like the freshest green bean in the garden. When you pop the tab, it’s like an actual green been has been snapped open, and its springtime juiciness of ripe, vegetal aromas waft up to seduce your nose. It’s like smelling green.

Canned green beans could never.

Tasting Notes

💚🌱🍏

The uncannily accurate snapped green bean sweetness expands into a broader sweetness, almost soaring into fruit territory. The can boasts “real sage extracts” which gives an undercurrent of something alive and earthy. But the overarching melody is almost a green apple. It’s a gritty green apple though, verdant and swinging from the branch, as the sweetness never veers candied or saccharine.

Truly it’s like a symphony of greens, pastels hues, robust kellys and deep hunters all working in concert to create an effervescent casserole.

We don’t know what Kermit was going on about, because being green is actually effortless in the deft hands of Aura Bora.

We can firmly assure you that this Green Bean Casserole bears absolutely no resemblance to the Thanksgiving atrocity by the same name. In fact, it tastes less like Problematic Fall Holiday and more like Spring Awakening. The garden of earthly delights coming to life, breaking through the crust of ice coating the grass, after seven decades under the reign of Dorcas, lord of the culinary underworld.

If you haven’t scored yours yet, GBC will probably already be sold out by the time this goes to print, but hopefully this also inspires you to set an embarrassing iPhone reminder next holiday season. Don’t listen to Mashed. Serve it at your tables. We humbly beg all twenty million of you GBC-serving sadists to replace satan’s postwar helldish with this. Healing your ancestral rifts will probably be coming along much better if you do.

Apparently Dorcas Reilly’s original recipe card lives in the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in Ohio, sharing hallowed real estate with Thomas Edison’s lightbulb. We firmly believe that Aura Bora’s secret recipe for whatever this sparkling casserole elixir should replace Dorcas’s “Green Bean Bake” as the real Hall of Fame, but this is not the first time we’ve questioned America’s taste.