Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 3 hours
Ingredients:
- See Below
Preparation:
If you're using freshly shelled beans, fine. If they're dry, on the other hand, soak them overnight and then slip them into a fairly wide-necked wine flask that's been peeled of its straw wrapper -- don't fill the flask much more than 3/4 full if the beans were dried, because they will expand -- together with a healthy squirt of olive oil, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, and several leaves of sage. Then add enough water to reach almost all the way up the neck of the flask.The flask was traditionally slipped into the oven after the bread was baked and let sit, resting on a pile of ashes, cooking very slowly for 3 hours or more (the ovens were wood-fired, and cooled slowly after the bread was baked). In a modern day setting fill your flask and bake it in the oven as you would a bean pot, at a very low temperature -- about 200 to 220 F -- for a number of hours, or set it in the coals of your hearth.
When the beans are done let them cool and serve them with a drizzling of fresh olive oil and salt & pepper to taste.
As for what to do with Fresh fava beans, there are certainly more elegant solutions, but few are as satisfying (to me) as the Tuscan custom of fresh fava beans with pecorino toscano. You bring a bowl of bean pods to the table, and a round of cheese; people cut wedges of the cheese and shell beans, alternating morsels of cheese with beans. This works well as an antipasto, or also a dessert in late spring/early summer. One warning: The beans shouldn't be overly large -- at the most 3/4 of an inch (1.5 cm).
