How to Process Fava Beans

As many of you know, I’m growing fava beans this year. This marks the second time I’ve grown them, although the last time was quite a few years ago. I’ve been pointing them out in my vegetable garden tour videos but thought you’d like to see how to process them in order to use the beans in cooking.

Fava bean plants are really attractive and their black-and-white blossoms are so unusual! So in addition to looking cool in the garden, you get to eat tasty beans. Such a deal.

I took the photo to the right to give you a size reference. You can see the pods are quite large! And plump, I might add. If you’re wondering when to pick them, wait until the pods are rounded and fairly firm. Just give each pod a gentle squeeze: does it feel sort of “cushiony” or just firm and tight? If it’s the latter, go ahead and pick it; but if the pod is still a little soft, leave it on the plant to ripen further.

At the top of this post, you can see a bowlful of the pods. We’ve picked about half of the pods so far and will pick the rest of them in about a week.

The next step is to shell the beans inside the pods. If you pull at the stem end of the pod, you’ll find it sort of unzips it and reveals the lovely seeds. Most fava bean cultivars have green seeds but, in this case, look at the beautiful peach-colored seeds! That’s because I planted ‘Karmazyn’ from Uprising Organics. I know it will seem wasteful to discard all of the green bean pods once you’re finished but if you add them to your compost pile, they will later feed your garden.

Once you have shelled all of the pods, bring a large kettle of water to a boil. Depending on the amount of seeds you have, you might be able to boil all of them at once or divide them up into a couple of batches. Boil the seeds until the green tips at the top of each seed turn bright green. This takes about 3 minutes of boiling. You’ll notice the color of the water was rather disgusting: it turned black! And my beautiful peach-colored seeds turned a brownish-gray. Not very appetizing, but the inner seeds were a lovely pea-green color and that’s what you’ll be eating.

Carefully strain out the seeds and place them in a colander that’s sitting in a sink of cold water. Let the seeds chill for a few minutes. Then you get to do the final step: popping the inner seed out of its little shell. Yeah, I know, this whole process is a bit tedious but you’ll find that many of the inner seeds will have done this all by themselves during the boiling process or are very easy to pop out. It just takes a little practice. Once I got into the rhythm of it, I had shelled 3 bowls of them very quickly.

Now you are finally ready to use them in cooking! There are all sorts of recipes on the web that use fava beans but here are two ideas: make a fava bean dip for crackers or raw vegetables. Or use fava beans in a pasta recipe. We tried this one a few nights ago and it was both simple and delicious!