Fava Beans Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re going to make a chilli with some Fava beans.

And I’ve been waiting to make this actually for couple of weeks now. I’ve had the fava beans, the dried one sitting in my cupboard but I’ve just haven’t been motivated to make them because they do need to be soaked overnight and then they need to cook for about two hours.

So they’re very long cooking bean but I mean you don’t have to sit around and watch them the whole time they just soaked overnight and then you can let them simmer away.

So, mine are just finishing up now and if you like I would definitely excuse you from doing this process, you can sub in some red kidney beans or some black beans would also be nice and if you wanna use canned that’s fine just look for a brand that doesn’t have too much artificial ingredients or salt on the label.

So, with the beans of course once you soaked them, you’re gonna drained them and then cooked them with no salt at this point. Why? Because the salt interferes with the cooking of the beans, give them a tough skin.

Now to start the chilli I’ve got a large soup pot heated up to about medium, I’m going to add a little bit of olive oil and as any good tomato sauce starts off with I’ll soothe some onions and then some garlic.

And you just throw them right in there once it’s hot. Give them a stir around in the oil. You wanna let them cook for a few minutes until the onions get a little bit soft and translucence, then add the garlic and then we’ll move on with the tomato sauce.

So, you’re looking for some softness in your onions. Once things get soft here with the onions and garlic then we’re going to add the spices and this is where we differentiate from a normal tomato sauce for like a pasta to the chilli is what spices we’re gonna put in here.

So, the first thing I’m gonna put in are some red pepper flakes and these are cayenne peppers, they are very very hot so go with however much you like and if you watch this before you know I’m very cautious personally with spicy things.

But if you like spice put some more in; I’ve also got some cumin and then again go what you like for amount. Now I’m putting in the individual spices, you could also go with chilli powder if you prefer this is too complex, that’s totally fine.

I just don’t like to keep a whole bunch of spice mixes in my house so I tend to go with the individual spices that way I can do it a little bit differently every time.

The next thing I got is some oregano and if you have access to Mexican oregano that is the traditional flavour in chilli but normal oregano is very similar, works just fine.

I’ve got some black pepper, a little bit of ground cloves, they’re also peppery but in a more chilli kind of way and some salt. Oh! I really smell the cloves coming out there. Wanna make me sneeze.

So the reason we are putting the spices in now is so that they got infuse with the oil with the onions and the garlic so that they’re flavours will stay maintained in the tomato sauce.

So once you get those stirred around, that’s really all you need to do and then we’re going to pour the tomato in here and a secret tip I have for making anything with tomato, tomato sauce, chilli, whatever is wearing red shirt and if you spill it doesn’t really matter.

Ok! Canned tomatoes, yes I’m using canned, if its summer you could use fresh. I like to get all the juices out here. And I like to use whole or diced tomatoes because I like the chunkiness. These are wholes so I’m just breaking them up with the spoon.

So my fava beans have finished cooking and I wanted to show you why I went with so much trouble with these guys, if you checked them out pretty cool looking right? Neat eh?!

You wanna give your sauce a taste here. Make sure you have a good ratio of spices. It will be a little bit raw because you need to give it time for those flavours to come together but its tasting pretty nice.

So what I’ll do next is throw my beans in here, stir them into the tomatoes and beans we cooked with no salt, right? But they need salt in order for the flavour to get into the beans. This wouldn’t taste that much on their own and they need at least 10 minutes for those flavours to enter them.

So, this needs to simmer for at least 10 minutes, you can go longer, the longer you go the better it gets. The last thing I’m gonna throw in here is some fresh cilantro and you don’t need to worry too much about how finely you chopped it unless you want to hide it.

And what I’m actually gonna do because we’re not having dinner for a little while yet I’m gonna throw these in the oven on a low. I’m gonna put it down let’s say 250F and just let it simmer basically.

Put the lid. This is also really easy to do in a slow cooker I had someone write to me asking about slow cooker recipe which I actually do not do because I don’t owned a slow cooker, I just find it easier to do things on a stove or oven but if you have a slow cooker and you want to use it this is easily adaptable to slow cooking just do this and then put it in a slow cooker and let it – let it simmer.

Alright! So we’ll let that sit for a bit and then you’ll be ready to have dinner.

Hope you enjoyed that. You can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.