Dry fava beans - to peel or not to peel?

Question

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?

Answer

Can't tell you about how it's handled traditionally but the one time i cooked favas from dried i removed the outer peel easily after the beans were cooked- it was a not yummy kind of tough leathery texture. Annoying but didn't actually take very long to do, the skins slipped off easily

Answer

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.

Answer

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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Dry fava beans - to peel or not to peel?

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Recipe

Ful Medames

Recipe

Bessara Dried Fava Bean Soup Recipe

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