Fava beans are my labor’s love. I am inordinately fond of the chubby legumes, which signal to me that high spring has arrived. They are my transition between the peas of spring and the string and shelly beans that mark the summer’s heat.
Fava beans are easy to grow, but do require lots of space and a long, cool growing season. Like my other favorite cool-weather legume the sugar snap pea, I start them in autumn and let them mature at a reasonable rate throughout the winter and spring.
By April, my fava beans have grown large. Some stand taller than six feet, a huge stalk for such a small morsel; the useful part of a fava is but a fraction of the plant. But then this is not really very different from corn or tomatoes. Or people, for that matter.
In case you care, here is a good primer on how to grow fava beans.
And if you fail to grow the fat Italian varieties, the useful portion of a fava bean pod will be smaller still. Unlike hot-weather beans, favas — one of the Old World’s few native legumes — do not fill their pods. I have grown varieties where the best I could hope for was one or two beans per pod.
After many flirtations with Native American varieties (adopted from those the Spaniards brought 500 years ago), English versions and even a Spanish fava, I have settled on the Italian supersimona strain, which can give me as many as eight big beans per pod. I knew I had chosen well when our Puglian neighbor Rosa looked at them and gasped, “Oh…those are better than mine!”
Yep. They are. In fact, my favas have lured me dangerously close to hubris. Other gardeners envy my favas. I have never had a bad crop. And every spring I am happily inundated with the emerald jewels. Last year I wound up with 15 pounds — after shucking. And I ate almost all of them fresh.
Fresh favas are slippery, mild, and slightly sweet with a texture not unlike al dente pasta. And they are one of the greenest things we eat. A freshly shucked and blanched fava bean is lurid — you wouldn’t think the color exists in Nature if you hadn’t grown it yourself.
But getting to that green takes effort. Many people don’t grow fava beans for just this reason. And I never fail to hear someone say, “I have no idea what to do with them!” whenever I idle near the fava bins at my local farmer’s market.
I suspect many of you who read this blog know your way around a fava bean. But for those who do not, allow me to walk you through it.
Picking fava beans takes practice: You want to pick when the favas begin to make lumps under the pods, but long before the pods discolor or begin to shrivel around the beans. You will get between 5 and 15 pods per plant.
The first shuck goes very quickly if you do it my way: Don’t bother with the strings, just anchor both thumbs behind a bean and push with them as you are bending the pod back — exactly as you would break a twig. Once you get the hang of it, you can do a bag of beans in 5 to 10 minutes. Shuck into a large bowl, as they will catapult out of the pod.
Once you have your bowl of beans, you still need to get them out of their jackets. Yes, you can eat them in their jackets, but if you do, explosive farting will be your reward. If this turns you on, try them with sunchokes. The rest of us will undress our favas.
Bring a huge pot of salty water to a boil. How salty? It should taste like the sea. Get an ice water bath ready. Grab a couple handfuls of favas and chuck them into the boiling water. Let them boil for a minute or two. You will know they are ready when they are all floating in the top of the water and hissing at you.
Plunge them into the ice water to stop the cooking. Now look for the reverse: When all the favas have sunk to the bottom, fish them out and you can start undressing them. Some, like the fava in the picture above, will have split jackets already: Just squeeze these out. Others you will need to prick with your thumbnail to slip out. Again, once you get the hang of it, this goes fast.
Now you can eat your fava beans, keep them in the fridge for a day or three, or vacuum-seal meal-sized portions of them and freeze for up to a year.
I have lots of fresh fava recipes, but one of my most favorite is to make a garlicky, slightly spicy puree out of them, which I then use to spread on toast. The same puree makes a fine ravioli filling, or faux pesto sauce for pasta.
Yield is about 4:1, so 4 pounds of fresh fava beans in the pods will yield about 1 pound of shelled beans.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned eating the fava tips. The young tender tips (similar to a pea shoot) are a delightful spring treat in salads or quickly cooked like spinach. They are a much easier reward than the beans, though I love those as well. Two types of food from one plant!
I grew up eating fresh fava beans cooked with the shells in olive oil And dill before they get too big. It is very difficult to find such fresh favas and any recipes how to cook them since I moved to US. I am now growing my own fava beans In San Francisco with their intoxicatingly wonderful aroma and cooking them.
Thanks Hank. I’ve eaten fava beans many times but never had the pleasure of cooking them at home. I’m going to toss them into a pesto fettuccine dish tonight-yum.
I grow these every year in my garden. On harvest day I save some whole pods for the grill. Brush the whole pod with olive oil then salt and pepper. Grill on the barbecue until slightly charred. Eat the whole thing, pod and all (no waste). One of my favorite ways to eat them. Great side dish.
Yet another reason to like you! 😀
Boiled fave with good canned tuna, hard boiled eggs, thin sliced sweet red onions and good olive oil. Fantastic!
Great info … Thanks, we are in the south west of Western Australia and just picked our crop
We will definitely try the recipe from N.Hawkins … Sounds yum
Thanks again for the I sites
Cheers Jill
I’m in Australia, and have just grown my first crop of Broad beans/
Fava beans. They are nearly two metres high, and just beautiful. Tonight we had a Pasta dish – onion, garlic, and chopped bacon, chicken stock, peas, chopped mint, and lots of fresh broad beans, served on pasta with crumbled fetta on top, and a drizzle of lemon infused olive oil. Superb!!
I really enjoyed this story I eat fava’s at least 4 to 5 times a month, in the New York area every spring favas show up in our produce markets. While I do freeze some, I find it easier to buy split dried fava throughout the winter. They are so easy to cook, the dried favas should be soaked overnight changing water often. I then place them in a pot along with a can of either beef or chicken broth and cook the beans to a mash, I add water to the Pot and when the broth boils down. Keep the heat low while cooking down. I add a little olive oil and eat the beans with any kind of greens. They are filling tasty and healthy. Enjoy.
Marsha: Yes, we have mild winters here. Very Mediterranean. We get some light frosts, but nothing too ferocious.
Planting sugar-snap peas and favas in Autumn and maturing them in Spring sounds wonderful! Do you have to have a mild winter do this? Can they go through a freezing winter like kale and onions?
I ate a dried and roasted in oil “nut” mix from Spain that did indeed contain favas, along with green peas, flat Spanish almonds, some huge pig corn (to break your teeth on) and smaller corn kernels (bitter and bad tasting). Interesting mix. I’ll get you some when you visit.
I am so very VERY jealous…these delights of spring are not available to those of us up north as yet. Lucky, lucky man!
As for dried favas, my friend Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm in Gaston, OR, grows fava di Carpino, a sweet, nutty fava from Apulia. Of his dried beans, he says that “cookbooks recommend peeling the favas, but we caution against this reckless action. There is not a trace of bitterness in the skins of this variety. Moreover, the skins are tasty and nutritious. Dress with olive oil, garlic and lemon juice, or prepare a ful with summer vegetables.”
The water is coming to a boil as we speak!
I do dry favas, too, Ken. Usually about 3-4 pounds fors several batches of a kind of skordalia and for soups — both pureed and whole.
The Greeks also apparently roast dry favas and eat them like corn nuts…
Dude, Those are among the most beautiful fava beans I have ever seen! You are perfectly right to be proud of them. Do try drying some for a kick. There are some great dishes that really need the texture of the dried beans – like a fabada, and I bet you these little babies will work fine with the skin on.
Ken
Fava beans or broad beans as I know them in the UK, are one of my all time favourite vegetables. I’ve started getting them in my vegetable box now that spring has arrived and I can’t get enough!
You would not believe how hard it is to find information about growing favas, so thanks for this great post and the tip on your Supersimonia variety. Our Windsors are up and their growth rate is phenomenal, but we’ll have to see just how much they produce. I have my eye on a few fava-based salads but am trying not to think too hard about something that may not happen this year!
I love fava beans also, just to eat them as you would edamame. I am going to try your spread, that sounds great