More than three months has passed since I celebrated tasting broad beans for the first time this year. But those were hot-house beans, raised (probably forced) in the far south of Kyushu. And that was out on the town in Tokyo.
When it comes to eating at home, though, we prefer to wait for them to appear on the trestles of our local farmers market. That doesn't usually happen until around Golden Week. Finally they are here. This morning we snapped up a kilo of them...
It's always worth the wait. Inside those long, soft, slightly fuzzy pods the individual beans are gleaming jade-green, small, delicate and soft — almost soft enough to eat raw.
Just a couple of minutes in lightly salted water and they're ready. Young and tender like this, they are perfect to eat just as they are. But in a week or so they will start to toughen up, and we will need to pop them out, discarding their leathery outer skins.
Another favourite way to prepare them is with a light dressing of oil (good Spanish extra virgin usually) and fresh thyme...
Besides the traditional plump Japanese broad beans with their superb sweet-bitter flavor, in recent years we've also been getting more exotic variants. Such as these Italian fava beans with longer pods — more actual beans per pod — and slightly milder flavor.
In Japanese, the standard name for broad beans is sora-mame (which literally means "sky beans"). But in some parts of the country they are called ten-mame ("heaven beans"). I tend to favour the latter term.
Because when I'm eating them I'm in broad bean heaven.
