Fava Beans.

06 February 2013.

Fava Beans with "Fiesta" Corn and Parsnip Chips.

After my puntarelle experience, I was looking forward to getting back into the swing of things with a less heady vegetable. Fortunately, at the market last Wednesday, next to the puntarelle stand was also a basket of fava beans, still tightly enclosed in their pods.

If you've never seen a whole fava bean, they look like overgrown sugar snap peas. I bought twelve, allowing six whole pods per person.
Preparing fava beans for cooking is, traditionally, a little more involved than a mere slice-and-dice, and almost as time-consuming than the suggested process for puntarelle. -- However, the "or else" has much less to do with flavor than with pure practicality/aesthetics. If you've eaten a sugar snap pea, you know that the pod is held together along one side by a sort of string-like element. While I'd argue that it isn't so bothersome in a snap pea, the fava bean is another story: the same "string" binds the two halves of a fava bean pod together as well, but thanks to the size of the pod, it is significantly longer, tougher, and essentially inedible. (I mean, you're welcome to swallow it, but you're not going to succeed in cutting or gnawing it into more manageable pieces and I refuse to be held responsible for any instances of choking that might incur thanks to improper prep.)
Removing the strings is relatively simple, and, if you start poking around on the internet, it appears to be obligatory. Very few cooks seem eager to use the entire plant, preferring for some reason unbeknownst to me to peel/shell the beans and dispose of the pods entirely. The newly-exposed beans are boiled very briefly (for fresh beans, a mere minute will do the trick) to separate the "waxy" white coating from the bright green bean underneath.
All of that said...
Sometimes, cooks admit, the waxy coating does not come off so easily and requires a great deal of, shall we say, dedicated encouragement. While I might, under very special circumstances (like at St. Patrick's Day party), be willing to stand over a steaming bowl of beans, attempting to remove a stubborn peel, on a weeknight when I'm in the business for a quick meal, this wouldn't be my first choice. Last night was a pretty ordinary evening in the Wegel household, so... I sought an alternative.

As it turns out, the entire fava bean --  pod and all (well, minus the stringy-bit) -- is edible. And I'm telling you now, in spite of the multiple websites that would tell you otherwise: you are under absolutely no obligation to open them up before you cook them. Cooks who are honest about the shelling process admit that it's sort of a shame to see a huge pile of green whittled down into a measly cup of beans, and you can bet that my let-nothing-go-to-waste heart wasn't too enthusiastic about that.

I prepared my beans within a matter of seconds, merely washing them and setting them aside on a kitchen towel. Yep, that's it -- I didn't cut the tops off, I didn't crack open the pods. Indeed, I would argue that there are advantages to leaving the strings in place and the pods intact during the cooking process, namely, the closed pod creates the perfect steaming environment for the enclosed raw beans. During the cooking process, the pods will naturally open up on their own -- thanks to the swelling of the beans cooking inside, and the shrinking of the pod itself (as the water cooks out), they'll break open along their "seams" by default.

I planned to serve my beans with a side of sweet & spicy corn. I began by slicing a large white onion; I minced two cloves of garlic and finely diced a chili pepper (seeds and all) and a small (relatively firm) Roma tomato. I used a deep skillet and heated it all over low heat, allowing ample time for the onions to caramelize (about ten minutes). At that point, I added a cup of corn and a half teaspoon of smoked paprika, two teaspoons of fresh dill, a teaspoon of salt, and a lot of freshly-ground black pepper.
And now, you can save yourself a clean-up step: I added the whole fava beans directly to the same skillet along with a bit of olive oil (about 2 teaspoons) and four tablespoons of white wine vinegar. -- Should you happen to have an open bottle of white wine, use it instead (I'm jealous). Quickly put a lid on the skillet and DON'T OPEN IT for at least ten minutes. Keep the heat on low, and trust the steaming process.

In the meantime, to keep my hands away from the skillet (not to be disturbed! Seriously! Don't stir it yet!) I peeled and cut a parsnip into thin slices (about 1/8"). I spread them out on a lined baking sheet, sprinkled with salt & pepper, and put them in the oven at 350 degrees until they started to darken on the edges (about fifteen minutes).

Now, you can open the skillet.
Give everything a good stir and evaluate -- as you stir, if the pods break open and the beans start making friends with the corn, that's a good thing.  (If not, you'll need to put the lid back on and wait for a few more minutes.) This is the moment you've been waiting for. Now, you'll want to add a little bit of water (1/8 cup) and put the lid back on. Leave it alone -- just walk away -- for five to ten minutes.

I made a yoghurt sauce to accompany the bean pods and parsnip chips, and to offset the spicy pepper in the corn -- to 1/4 cup yoghurt I added the juice of half a lemon, a teaspoon of fresh dill, and black pepper.

When it's time to serve (the water will have disappeared and the beans will be tender), remove the long green bean pods from the skillet. You can do your dinner companions a favor by removing the stringy-bits for them (they'll peel away very easily now -- remember what I said about choking hazards). I served the pods as a "green," apart from the corn and beans.
To finish, I drizzled my bean pods with a tiny, tiny bit of honey -- I like the contrasting flavors of honey, paprika and lemon.