Preparing fresh fava beans is tedious, I won’t lie. But if you tackle the process separately from cooking with them for a meal, you’ll find the work worth the effort. Most traditional ...

Fresh fava bean pod, opened at the seam (Lola Gomez / Staff Photographer) Although easy to cook, fava beans require lots of prep work: opening the pods to release the beans from their fuzz-lined ...

They're only in season for about six weeks, and that time is now. Buy your fava beans at farmers markets while you still can. Here's what to do with them next.

Dried Fava Beans While fresh fava beans are only available seasonally, you can buy dried fava beans, both whole and split, year-round.

Dried Fava Beans While fresh fava beans are only available seasonally, you can buy dried fava beans, both whole and split, year round.

For those less adventurous diners, we double-pick the fava beans and then mash them with fresh garlic, onion, lime juice, jalapeño, cilantro, olive oil, and salt.

What’s more labor-intensive than fresh favas? First you shuck the pods — big and green and delicately fuzzy — to get just a few beans out of each one.

Every cook has certain tedious kitchen tasks that he or she doesn’t mind, along with those that make him want to scream. I can stand in front of a pot of bubbling beans for hours, stirring aw… ...

Fava or broad beans are flat, nutritious legumes that contain protein, fiber and iron. Most recipes call for fresh fava beans, something that can be hard to find without a trip to a farmers market ...

For the Moroccan Fresh Fava Bean Spread (see recipe), Wolfert likes to use beans that are still young, but a little bigger -- from pods of 5 to 6 inches long -- the ones that will flood Bay Area ...

Fava beans, an early summer favorite, is tedious to prep but worth the effort to make a vegetarian spin on shrimp scampi.