I bought a bag of dried favas from my local Middle Eastern market to make ful mudammas. I've cooked a whole bunch of dried beans and I've made some dishes with fresh favas, but I've never specifically used dried favas before.
Is it desirable to do the laborious step of peeling dried favas after soaking but before cooking? I have done this with fresh favas, but did not expect to see people recommending it for dried favas (I've never done it with dried pinto, peruano, garbanzo, great northern, Tarbais, or any other bean). Yet it turns out that many people do. How are these typically handled in kitchens in North Africa and the Middle East?
For example:
Claudia Roden says "and left unpeeled" for ful mudammas: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/foo...
NYT says use "skinless" dried beans for fava bean soup (actually adapted from one of Roden's recipes): http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/71...
After initial cooking they were unpleasantly leathery, as you describe. I threw a little baking soda in and turned off the heat (baking soda is my secret trick for speeding the cooking of stubborn beans, and the hope here was that the higher pH would help break down the cellulose in the skins in addition to the bean protein). This morning, after letting them sit that way overnight, they did seem somewhat better. I am giving them another hour to cook, another pinch of baking soda, and hoping that does the trick.
My guess is that bean size is important here. Tiny dried favas will likely present less of this problem compared to bigger, more mature versions of the same bean.
Most of the leather was broken down after that last run. However, this required cooking the beans down to a dark mush. I will look for smaller beans next time, peel after soaking/blanching, or settle for <gasp> canned.
Yeah that's what i was afraid of...bean moosh. Look in the freezers of Mediterranean and itslian groceries for frozen favas, those are often already peeled and keep a nice texture. For a short time in the spring (i think) trader joe's also sells frozen peeled favas at a great price- if you find them stock up.
So I tried it the other way with the second half of the bag: soak, peel, then cook.
A 24 hour soak got most of the beans soft enough that I could get the skins off without much trouble. Of course, removing them one by one, even if it's easy, is a huge pain in and of itself for a few hundred beans. Unfortunately, this time I let the pot boil awhile without paying any attention to it until it was foaming over, and this time ended up with concentrated, unappetizing gray bean mush (it tasted OK after adding some water back in).
I think I'm going to stick with cans for a while and doctor them up with spice and condiments for ful. It's not worth all the hassle and energy costs to mess with unpeeled dry favas.
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