A simple, smoky solution

Globalization is not always a bad thing. These days you can go off to an Argentina-born friend’s birthday party in Italy and come home with a California solution to one of the universal kitchen mysteries: how to cook fava beans without seven hours of prep work.

Before this revelation, I considered favas the Brazil nuts of beans. First, you have to shell them, then you have to slip a tight skin off every single one. The naked legumes are worth the struggle, but you still wind up throwing out about two-thirds of what you pay for. I found the antidote as soon as I walked into a kitchen in the Medici villa outside Florence, where Judy Rodgers of Zuni Cafe in San Francisco was doing the hors d’oeuvres. Another guest shoved a plate covered with charred green things at me and said: “Taste this. They’re amazing.�

The fava pods had just been grilled in a basket over smoldering coals, and the beans inside were soft and smoky. Essentially they had steamed in their husks; they had turned tender enough to pop like edamame, skin and all. We could even eat the oozy blackened pods.

Rodgers later explained her eureka moment. She had been giving a tour of the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, north of Santa Barbara, during a teaching gig when one of the harvesters asked what to do with the fava beans growing there and another responded, “We throw them on the grill.�

It was an idea too weird not to try on purists in Italy. Rodgers’ method is to lightly oil and salt the pods and lay them on a super-hot grill for a couple of minutes until they get “jail marks.� (They take a little longer on a stove-top grill.) It may not be as Tuscan as grilling radicchio, but you’re left with a finger food as salty and satisfying as corn on the cob.