Many years I plant fava beans in the backyard garden as cover crops. For best agricultural-amendment use I cut them down at the flowering stage, when they’ve fixed the most nitrogen into the soil, and chop them up as additional ‘green manure’ / mulch. But for eating I let the pods and seeds develop to harvest.

I jotted down details in a notebook in the past, but I’ll keep some quick notes here from some experiments freezing a large 2025 crop.

From just 2 1/2 raised beds, I harvested about 16+20+18 = 54 pounds of pods. After shelling, 6+9+9 = 21 pounds of seeds (including the outer skin which we’ll typically remove before eating).

In a past year I just quickly blanched them (30-60s) before freezing. For larger fava beans that doesn’t fully cook them, and after a bit more reading this year I decided to more fully cook them, and have split my preserving into three batches:

Blanche and Freeze

  • Dropped in boiling well-salted water in modest batches for ~4 minutes (though this is probably only ~1 minute of actively boiling since the water slowly comes back to a boil).
  • Then plunge into ice water to halt cooking and let soak for at least 4 minutes. They also become easier to peel after this rest, if relevant.
  • Drain, then spread on towels and pat dry
  • Spread out on parchment paper on a sheet pan to freeze for a few hours (in batches)
  • Remove from freezer, then portion into ziploc or vacuum foodsaver bags for long-term freezing.

I’ve adopted this two-step freezing process for many small high-water-content items like berries or chopped fruit– it helps avoid freezing them into one solid hard-to-break-apart brick, and when using a vacuum bagger also prevents crushing more delicate items in the vacuum.

For many uses, we’d still have to peel the outer fava skin off when we defrost these before cooking with them, but I’ve read that is easier after freezing.

Boil and Freeze

  • Dropped in boiling water, brought back to a boil (took 4-8 minutes), then boiled for 4 solid minutes. The inner bean under the skin is a bright green at this point. After this I did the same processing as above (ice bath, drain, pat dry, freeze partially on sheet trays, then bag and freeze)

Peel and Freeze

I followed the same longer “Boil and Freeze” process above, except after the ice bath I painstakingly peel the outer skin off and freeze only the delicious peeled centers.

This will make eventual meal prep easier and uses less freezer space, at the cost of spending a lot of extra time now to peel the favas. Fortunately I had a good audio book to listen to…

This process also led to freezing more of a mash of fava beans– it’s harder to keep them intact:

Defrosting & Eating Notes

(to be added once we try defrosting and eating using each of these three methods)

See the “fava + anchovy pesto” recipe for notes on some past cooking with them.