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 with the whole pods. I saw the right way after walking into a kitchen in a 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 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 eat like edamame, skin and all. We could even eat the oozy blackened pods. Rodgers later explained her own epiphany. 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 ¡§students¡¨ asked what to do with the fava beans growing there and a harvester responded, ¡§We throw them on the grill.¡¨ It was an idea too weird not to try on purists in Italy. Her method is to lightly oil and salt them 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 stovetop 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.
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