It’s scary how quickly the crops are coming to the end of their run. The broad beans, which were our first crop of the year, have now run their course, and so today I picked what remained of the pods and dug up the plants. That freed up some of the plot for planting new crops, but it also meant that we had more beans than we can eat right now.
Fortunately broad beans are easy to store. You can either dry them by leaving the pods on the plants until they start to turn yellow, popping out the beans themselves and letting them dry fully before storing them in an airtight jar. You then soak them overnight before you want to use them, and boil as usual.
Or, you can blanche them. As the plot was starting to look messy with so many ageing bean plants getting straggly in it, that’s the option we went for. I didn’t want to leave the plants in there any longer while we waited for them to dry and in the process risked losing them to pests.
I shelled them out in the garden and then brought them in, where I threw them in a pot of boiling water for exactly two minutes. When their time was up, I drained them and immediately plunged them into a bowl of ice cold water to stop them cooking any further.
They are now effectively blanched.
The next stage was to dry them off by dabbing them on a tea towel, then divide them into portions and wrap each portion in greaseproof paper so it can be removed and cooked individually. If you didn’t do that, you’d just end up with a big ball of frozen beans that you would be forced to cook in one go. That would rather defeat the object of preserving them as you’d have the same problem as we have today: too many beans for one meal.
When cooking the frozen beans, boil them for six minutes.
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