Our Fava Greens Pesto is top-notch cozy comfort food coming from a super easy to grow and helpful plant every garden benefits from. 🌿 We’ve made a plant-based, vegan version that is out of this world good and couldn’t be more excited to share it with you all.

You read that correctly – fava greens. Did you know you could eat fava bean leaves?! I didn’t until I was trimming back these beautiful soil nitrogen-fixing plants one day and a neighbor mentioned it in passing. Best tip I’ve gotten in a while. These leaves have a buttery taste to them similar to the beans they produce but minus all the work to free the beans from their pods!

Our Spin on Pesto

If we’re getting all technical here, Merriam-Webster defines pesto as, “a sauce made especially of fresh basil, garlic, oil, pine nuts, and grated cheese.” In our play on this pesto, we aim to reduce our oil intake and have up’ed our nuts instead – trading out pine nuts for cashews for a creamier texture. The cheesiness of this sauce comes from a combo of lemon juice (or apple cider) and nutritional yeast. We prefer this to using store-bought vegan cheeses, which are typically heavy in oils as well. Instead of fresh basil, we’ve used fresh fava greens, but you could definitely add basil as well to this dish!

How to Grow Fava Beans

Fava beans are a super easy and satisfying cool-annual to grow. Typically, they are planted in February and March to harvest beans in late spring/early summer and in September through November as a cover crop to nourish the soil. I walk my gardens with a bag full of dried fava beans and just push them into the soil where ever I find a space about knuckle deep. They are hardy and resistant to frost damage, handling temperatures as low as 20 degrees. In colder climates, as soon as your soil is workable, get these beautiful beans in the ground! They sprout within a couple weeks and start drawing nitrogen for your soil, among a plethora of other benefits.

For your recipe, try to snip leaves from the top of your fava bean plants as they are the sweetest, most buttery flavored. Older leaves can start to have a chalky texture.

Ingredients

This pesto’s base is our go-to cashew cream in our house, made up of cashews, an acid like lemon juice or apple cider vinegar, and nutritional yeast. To this we add some tapioca starch to help give more creamy thickness to this pesto, as well as walnuts for both texture and omegas our bodies need (we’re always sneaking in omegas into our dishes over here). A clove or two of garlic gives that pesto punch we all love. Lastly, add your fava bean leaves to create a gorgeous green nutrient boost.

How to make Fava Greens Pesto

One of the most important steps for this pesto is to soak your cashews overnight. But let’s be real here – hardly do I ever plan that far ahead for a meal. So a quick fix is to instead is to simply just pour boiling water over your beans in a bowl and let them sit for about ten minutes. I typically do this prior to going out into the garden to harvest fava leaves.

Once your cashews are soft, combine all other ingredients with them and blend in a high speed mixer until smooth. At this point the pesto should be slightly watery, as the tapioca starch will help firm it up when you add it to a warmed pot that you can reuse from cooking your pasta.

Add your greens and walnuts to the mix last and pulse to blend until just combined, creating a chunky texture. Pour into a warm pot used to cook pasta to thicken, and then stir in pasta.

Pesto Storage

This pesto will store in the fridge for up to a week in a sealed container. Use it on pasta, sandwiches, wraps, and even as a topper on a savory breakfast tofu scramble or homemade hash browns.

This dish is a great spring treat! Let us know what you think in the comments below. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

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