Ful Medames (Egyptian Breakfast Fava Beans With Tahini)

Favas stewed with tahini and seasoned with garlic, cumin, and lemon is a perfect way to greet the day.

Ful medames served inside a bowl with a side of toasted pita

Serious Eats / Qi Ai

Why This Recipe Works

  • Toasting cumin seeds, then mashing them with garlic in a mortar and pestle releases maximum flavor.
  • Lemon and tahini balance out the fava bean's inherent funk.

The zeitgeisty chokeholdhummushas on the American public has always bugged me. Not because hummus isn't good. But because it's unfairly eclipsed so much other good stuff from the Middle East.

Take the North African and Levantine classic of stewed fava beans, ful medames. You've heard of it, right? Or perhaps you haven't? Yeah, because companies like Sabra and their millions of marketing dollars have led you to believe that hummus and you are anOTP, damn the rest of the Middle East's mindboggling culinary diversity.

So let's talk about ful (pronounced "fool") for a minute, because you might find you like it even more than hummus. Where the chickpea is a wan wallflower, the fava—and I'm talking the brown, dried or canned variety here—is proudly, robustly funky. Hummus is one texture: creamy. Ful, with its mashed-up beans and rich broth, is more fun and varied, and it takes ingredients like cumin, garlic, and tahini to bolder places than hummus ever could.

You'll find ful all over, from Ethiopia, where it's served with hot green peppers, to Yemen, where it's a soupy, almost-puréed concoction with tomatoes. Syrians in Aleppo love their ful, which they often top liberally with their famous sanguine chilies.

But my favorite ful comes from Egypt, where it's power breakfast on the streets of Cairo. There, ful vendors stew dried favas day and night until the beans are fall-apart soft, then they add tahini, crushed garlic, cumin seeds, and lemon. Creamy, a little spicy, and more than a little pungent, all the ful needs is some fresh pita for swabbing.

This was what my Egyptian friend Alex ate almost daily when living in Cairo, and every once in a while he'd grace my kitchen table with a batch of his own. It's from Alex that I learned the importance of mashing your garlic in a mortar and pestle and how to balance its pungency with just the right amount of cumin and lemon. Just as withpestoorguacamole, smashing helps to make the most of its raw, brash flavor.

A ceramic cooking vessel of simmering ful medames.

Serious Eats / Max Falkowitz

Alex also taught me that the world won't end if you use canned favas instead of dried. Actually, the ful might be better for it.

I'm normally adried beans-only kind of guy蚕豆,但我例外。首先,做饭ing dried favas is a royal pain. They're harder to find than the canned version and take a long, long time to cook (like chickpea long). Also, while most canned bean liquid tastes pretty insipid, the broth in canned favas is a great addition to ful—it carries plenty of the beans' innate funky flavor, and when boiled down a little with tahini, it makes for the perfect ful consistency.

Canned favas also cut your cook time from hours to minutes. That's important. This is breakfast, after all.

Tahini is added to a pot of simmering favas.

Serious Eats / Max Falkowitz

This recipe is for Cairo-style ful in all its creamy, comforting glory. But there's another ful I want to share before we go back to pretending that hummus is the only bean mush in the Middle East. It's the recklessly indulgent kind that Alex's father, Tarek, makes when there's no one around to tell him no. Alex's ful is relatively restrained; Tarek's is too much in the best possible way. For his spicier, richer take on this classic dish, see my recipe forspicy ful medames.

All it needs is some pita, but if you're in leisurely brunch mode, take the time to make sometomato-cucumber salad(or radish-cucumber in tomato-unfriendly weather), get out some labne or a soft cheese (I like Istanbuli), and fry up somefalafel. That's a full Egyptian breakfast to be proud of.

A plate of ful medames served with falafel, labne, side salad and a piece of toasted bread.

Serious Eats / Max Falkowitz

Of course this is just the beginning. You can always add hardboiled eggs to your ful, or chopped tomatoes.

You could even, horror of horrors, serve it over hummus.

January 2015

Recipe Details

Ful Medames (Egyptian Breakfast Fava Beans With Tahini)

Active10 mins
Total10 mins
Serves3 to 4 servings

Favas stewed with tahini and seasoned with garlic, cumin, and lemon is a perfect way to greet the day.

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  • 3clovesgarlic

  • 1teaspooncumin seeds, freshly toasted

  • Kosher salt

  • 2(15-ounce)cansfava beans

  • 3tablespoonstahini

  • 2 to 3tablespoonslemon juice from 2 lemons, or more to taste

Directions

  1. Put garlic cloves, cumin seeds, and a pinch of salt in a mortar and pestle and crush until seeds are cracked and garlic is in small, flimsy chunks. If you don't have a mortar and pestle, mince garlic very fine.

    Garlic cloves, cumin seeds, and salt crushed inside mortar

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

  2. Empty fava beans (with liquid) into a medium saucepan and combine with tahini and garlic paste. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring frequently, until liquid retains some brothiness but turns thick and sauce-like, about 5 minutes.

    Fava beans, tahini, and garlic paste cooked inside medium saucepan

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

  3. Add lemon juice and salt to taste. Mash one-third of the beans with a potato masher to thicken if desired, then serve with toasted pita.

    Beans mashed with potato masher and added back to beans

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

Special Equipment

Mortar and pestle(optional)

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Nutrition Facts(per serving)
214 Calories
7g Fat
29g Carbs
12g Protein
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Nutrition Facts
Servings: 3 to 4
Amount per serving
Calories 214
% Daily Value*
Total Fat7g 8%
Saturated Fat 1g 5%
Cholesterol0mg 0%
Sodium549mg 24%
Total Carbohydrate29g 11%
Dietary Fiber 8g 27%
Total Sugars 3g
Protein12g
Vitamin C 5mg 23%
Calcium 71mg 5%
Iron 3mg 16%
Potassium 420mg 9%
*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.
(Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate.)