You Should Stop Shelling Your Fava Beans
All photos by Farideh Sadeghin.

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Food

You Should Stop Shelling Your Fava Beans

Abraham Conlon from Chicago's Fat Rice is here with a better way.

It took 20 long years for Abraham Conlon to realize he’d been eating fava beans wrong his whole life. Hey, some of us are late bloomers. It’s fine!

Conlon’s moment of gastronomic epiphany happened a few years ago on a trip to Portugal. Growing up in a blue-collar Portuguese family in Lowell, Massachusetts, he’d been conditioned to peel his fava beans. This trip, however, made him realize that peeling fava beans is sort of silly—counterintuitive, really.

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“Why have I been peeling fava beans?” he says out loud, standing before me as he reenacts that moment. “That’s where the flavor is trapped. The skin. Don’t peel the fava beans.”

Saving the skin makes for a more texturally appealing fava bean, he explains. It also just saves time.

Conlon is standing in the MUNCHIES Test Kitchen one Friday morning in April with his business partner, Adrienne Lo. Together, the two own Fat Rice, the wildly popular Chicago restaurant whose menu that borrows elements from the cuisines of Portugal and its former colony Macau.

Conlon is charmingly scatterbrained as he navigates the kitchen. The previous night, he explains, he cooked up a feast for some folks at the James Beard House, and he’s got enough leftovers to feed a micronation. He unloads trays full of bacalhau (grandmother salt cod), spicy Goan blood sausage, white sweet potato cake, and vegetable samosas with shrimp paste.

“You guys will be stuffed out of your minds!” Conlon exclaims giddily, wiping off his sweat-glazed forehead.

Today, though, he's ready to cook something a lot easier than what he made last night: He's making his fava bean escabeche. It’s convenience food that can be eaten and cooked year-round.

Quite a few of his restaurant's recipes have been immortalized in 2016’s The Adventures of Fat Rice: Recipes from the Chicago Restaurant Inspired by Macau. You won’t find this one inside the pages of a cookbook, though. It lives on the menu of Fat Rice, and it may just be his favorite.

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He takes a Le Creuset and, over medium-high heat, puts two-thirds of a cup of extra virgin olive oil (at least two-thirds of a cup, he stresses, though more wouldn’t hurt) and quite a bit of cubed jamón ibérico—“as much jamon iberico as you can afford,” he says. It’s an admittedly imprecise measurement; Conlon estimates it may be about $50 worth, though. In the event that you can’t get jamón ibérico, prosciutto or jamón serrano will suffice.

He renders the jamón in that shallow pool of olive oil before crushing three small heads of garlic and putting them in the pot, warming the garlic until it begins to toast. He adds one large onion, diced, to add moisture and keep the garlic from burning to a crisp.

Once the onions soften, he removes half of that hodgepodge from the stove and sticks it on a plate.

He then takes a bag of Goya-brand frozen fava beans along with what he reckons are about two teaspoons of salt, pinching generously. “He has the biggest pinch in the land!” he exclaims, referring to himself in the third person. (It’s endearing, I swear.)

He grinds about a teaspoon of fresh ground black pepper onto the mixture, too, semi-furiously.

“Grind until your arms hurt,” he says. “Until the pepper mill is out of pepper.”

He adds two cups of water and half a cup of apple cider vinegar to the pot, bringing it to a boil; he chops up a bunch of cilantro—sorry, 'tro, as he calls it—and throws the stems headfirst into the pot. The remaining half of the 'tro will go on the portion that’s already plated.

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He zests two lemons and sets them aside, dumping two bird chiles and two teaspoons of sugar into the pot before removing it from heat altogether and letting it cool.

MAKE THIS: Fava Bean Escabeche

He puts the plated garlic, onions, and chopped ‘tro into the pot, along with that lemon zest, and squeezes lemon juice on top of the mixture, rolling them through to combine. The escabeche takes on a muted lime green color.

Conlon says this can be made days ahead of time, and it can go anywhere, really. Serve it as an appetizer. Dress your salad with it. Make it a bread dip. Eat it on its own as a snack with toothpicks. Pair it with wine or beer. Heck, use it as a sauce for pasta! Conlon just stresses it should marinate for at least three hours, or perhaps overnight. Otherwise, it’ll be slimy.

Right then and there, though, it doesn’t matter. A slimy fava bean is a fine fava bean indeed, especially when it’s coated in olive oil mucous. We eat it anyway.