In a recent post, I wrote about cooking fave secche (dried fava beans) for the first time. For my second experience, I decided to realize a dish from Calabria (a region in southern Italy), whose recipe I had seen on the Accademia Italiana della Cucina site a while back: macco di fave (fava bean purée). The English version of the recipe is available in the book by the Academy called La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy.
I soaked one cup of dried fava beans in plenty of water overnight (16 hours or so), then drained and removed the skin. The photo above shows the dried beans before and after the soaking and skin-removal process (right and left, respectively). A longer soaking may be needed, depending on the fava beans, so that you can easily remove the skin. Hence, you may want to allocate 24 hours to this step. The original recipe calls for the fava beans only to be soaked. I don't like the skin, so I take the extra step of removing it. Also, it seems to me that in order to end up with a purée, the skin should be removed from the fava beans. Finally, in the book, there is another recipe for macco di fave, this one from Sicily, and in it, the fava beans are peeled after being soaked.
The original recipe for macco di fave calls for 500 g of dried fava beans. One cup is a third of that quantity. These are the ingredients I used:
- one cup of fava beans, soaked for 16 hours (or as needed), skin removed
- 3 leaves of fresh basil (basilico), rather large, finely slivered
- a tiny dried hot chili pepper (peperoncino rosso), left whole
- half a tablespoon of tomato paste (concentrato di pomodoro)
- olive oil
- grated homemade blue-veined cheese to taste (the original recipe calls for grated pecorino)
- salt
I consider myself a minimalist in the kitchen, and this recipe appealed to me for its simplicity which does not come at the expense of flavor. In case you have never tasted dried fava beans, they are quite flavorful. And the peperoncino adds some heat to the macco. This is the procedure I followed. Note that the original recipe calls for cooking the fava beans in a pentola di terracotta (terracotta pot). I wish I could follow this traditional cooking method. Since I don't own such cooking vessel, I used a saucepan.
- Put the fava beans in a saucepan with 3 cups of cold water, the basil, chili pepper, tomato paste and a generous pinch of salt. (The recipe does provide the exact amount of water, so I estimated and was happy with my guess.)
- Bring to a boil and simmer, covered. Once the fava beans have softened (after about 20 minutes), start stirring with a spoon and mashing the fava beans against the side of the pan with the spoon until the fava beans are reduced to a purée. This is what makes preparing this dish fun. I repeated the stirring + smashing routine every five minutes or so, making sure that the soup was always simmering. It took my macco an hour to reach the consistency I like, though I think this time may vary, so adjust it as needed. The texture was not smooth: small fragments of fava beans make the macco rustic and quite pleasant.
- Taste the macco and adjust salt as needed.
- I have always done the previous steps a few hours ahead, and reheated the macco close to serving time. I think the resting period has a beneficial effect on the taste and texture of the final dish.
- Remove the peperoncino.
- Ladle in bowls, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with the cheese. My homemade blue-veined cheese, with its pungent flavor, worked well in this soup.
- Serve immediately.
The Academy recipe adds that macco is served as a soup over toasted slices of country-style bread (pane casereccio), something I did not do, but I can see trying in the future.
This is my submission for My Legume Love Affair 28, the current edition of the popular, legume-centered event created by Susan, The Well-Seasoned Cook, and hosted this month by Divya of Dil Se.. This post contains the roundup of the event.
This is also my submission for Souper (Soup, Salad & Sammies) Sundays, a weekly event created by Deb of Kahakai Kitchen. This post contains the roundup of the event.
Click on the button to hear me pronounce the Italian words mentioned in the post:
or launch the macco di fave audio file [mp3].
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