Broad beans

Broad beans have two theological points to make.

The first is God's wide-ranging and somewhat lavish provision for us.

The second is yet further proof that God is not interested in efficiency.

We harvested about a third of the broad bean crop this week.  We got a ton of greenery from the plants, and the outer pods, that went into the compost bins.  This left us with about four cups of the inner beans, before double potting.

You can, of course, eat the broad beans at this point.  That's the way I cooked them for Gloria for thirty years.  Which, of course, was wrong, or, at least, limited.  The inner husk of the bean is not a particularly pleasant flavor, although it does have some minor nutritional value.  But most of the time what you want to do is double podding.

Actually, before I go on to the double podding, I should note that even before you get to this stage, you can have a meal from the broad bean plants.  First of all, the new growth, even after the plants start producing beans, can be eaten either raw as greenery and salads, or cooked as you would spinach or cabbage.  So that's one form of provision.  Then there are the bean pods themselves.  When they are between five and ten centimetres long, they can be picked directly off the plant and eating like snow peas.  They're not quite as sweet as or flavorful as snow peas, but they definitely are edible at that point.

However, of course, most people are going to wait until they get actual pods with actual beans in them.  This is where the observation about efficiency comes in.  When the bean pods do get to the size where they are actually producing beans, it doesn't seem to matter how big they get: most of the time you still only get four beans out of a pod.  And you're taking the pods and throwing them away.

No, you don't actually need to throw them away. Some people, even with the pod husks, will fry up those husks as a kind of a snack.  We haven't tried that yet, but a lot of people do say that you can do it.  Then, of course, there is the parable of the prodigal son.  At one point it mentions that he would fain have eaten the husks that were fed to the pigs but no one gave him any.  Broad beans are one of the oldest cultivars that mankind has grown, and those husks that they fed to the pigs were probably the outer pods from broad beans.  They still have some nutritional value, and definitely the pigs ate them, and starving prodigal sons would have liked to have eaten them, even though they were probably a bit fibrous and possibly tasteless (without being fried).

Anyway, back to the double podding.  Once you've got the beans out of the pods, you then boil or blanch them for between one and three minutes, depending upon which websites you trust.  You then immediately plunge the boiled beans into cold water to loosen the other husks even further.  At this point you can remove the inner husks relatively easily, although it is a bit of a tedious process.  You simply squeeze the beans between thumb and forefinger, and the inner bean shoots out and you are left with the inner husk in your fingers.  The inner bean, of course, is what you keep, and the inner husk gets thrown away at this point or it goes into the compost heap.

The inner beans are a rather startling bright green after the rather dull colored beans that you have harvested out of pods.  And, even at that point, and even with nothing else done to them, they're rather tasty just by themselves.  But, of course, there are all kinds of things that you can do with the beans at this point.

You can use them as you would any other kind of bean.  You can heat them up with a sauce.  You can put them into any recipe as a replacement for protein, or carbohydrates.  In a quick search L found about forty different recipes of all kinds of ways to prepare broad beans: in quiches, and risottos, and, what really tickled my fancy, some kind of being and bacon dish.

But what we did was mash them.  This turns them into a sort of guacamole, which I immediately dubbed bean-o-nomole.  L added some avocado as a kind of a binder, because the beans don't hold together particularly well.  She also added some lemon juice, grated onion, and grated Parmesan.  Of course as with anything that L does it was delicious.  And I imagine rather nutritious as well, served on toast or crackers.  Or as a dip in any other way.  Probably as a vegetable dip of some kind it would be quite nutritious indeed.