Harvesting and Preparing Fava Beans
This is the first year we’ve grown fava beans (also known as broad beans). They overwinter here in our warmer climate and we have been nothing but happy with this new addition to the homestead. We ate a lot of the fava bean leaves over the winter in salads and soups. Once spring weather came on, the plants shot up and flowered, making me wonder how my clothesline nearby could smell so lovely as I hung the laundry – it was the fava bean flowers!
We’ve had three small bean harvests thus far. The first harvest I went ahead and shelled the beans and then blanched them, which is something I had read about in order to get the “bitter” outer skin off the small bean itself. Stewart then did some more research and found that many don’t bother with this second step. So the other two harvests I went ahead and let the children shell them (they love that job) and then just cooked them up.
They aren’t huge at this stage but we didn’t detect any bitterness at all. From our research you can also let them dry and eat them as a dried bean. I also recommend rinsing them after shelling, depending on the state of your sheller’s hands. 😉
Once shelled I cooked them as I would a green bean or fresh lima bean. A quick toss into the pasta water at the end of cooking time or a last minute addition to a jambalaya was just the five or ten minutes they needed to tenderize while still maintaining structural integrity.
We recently ordered sweet potato slips so this week or next we will be chopping down the bean stalks and harvesting whatever remains. Lord willing, Stewart wants to plant much more this fall as they have contributed to winter and spring meals as well as a great deal of organic matter that will be chopped and dropped right back into the chicken field.
When I was a child in Britain I ate them hot with the shells still on, liberally salted and peppered and covered in butter with bread and butter on the side. My Welsh mother also had them like this when she was a child ( or so she told us – I rather fancy that there would have been a bit less butter as she grew up with food rationing after World War II). I never tasted broad beans as we called them without the shells until I came to America.
Sorry I guess I meant the tough outer skins when I say “shells”.
My mom makes beef stew and then adds the 1 inch chopped whole fava beans (shell and all) and serve it over rice.
Look up a recipe for felafel!!! They are delicious using the dried beans done this way! It’s true that you don’t need to remove the inner bean skin until they get much larger. We eat them three ways. Mini beans not peeled ( just the outer lining removed ) older bean seeds peeled and the outer skin removed ( they do better in robust dishes but can be still enjoyed just boiled ) and finally dried and made into falafel or used as a dried bean in soups and stews. They are a lovely plant for sure!