Field Bean Hummus

 No one should be allowed to play the violin until he has mastered it - Jim Fiebig

I've written before about growing field beans as a cover crop/green manure. Planted in autumn, they mature in the early summer of the following year. Botanically identical to broad beans, they are a small-seeded variety used to provide ground cover over the winter. They can be dug in as a green manure or harvested as an edible crop; often for animal feed but they are also suitable for human consumption.

Photo 1: Field Beans Ready for Harvesting (mid-June 2026)

As you can just about see in Photo 1, field beans grow much taller than broad beans and some of the plants have toppled over. Not a problem except that somewhere in that green forest is my onion patch. Recent health issues have resulted in unconstrained growth and plenty of weeds. Time to harvest the beans and de-weed the onions.

While field beans are a prolific crop, producing 20 or more pods per plant, they are somewhat fiddly to release from their pods (Photo 2). Last year, we blanched and froze the bulk of the crop and used them in stews and curries throughout the year.

Photo 2: Field Beans After Podding (June 22nd 2026)

This year we thought we would try something a little different in addition to frozen beans: field bean  hummus! All the hummus recipes we could find using broad beans required boiling/cooking the beans followed by removal of the outer skin. This is easy enough for the larger broad bean but very fiddly with our much smaller field beans. Consequently, we boiled our field beans for about three minutes and, after draining, transferred the beans to our Vitamix blender. Garlic, tahini, lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil and a little salt were added to the beans in the blender. Our old and well-used Vitamix had a bit of trouble blending the mixture (it maybe time to get a replacement) so it was finished off using a stick blender. Since we had not de-skinned the beans before blending, we added a final stage in which the blended mixture was forced through a fine-to-medium sieve.

We enjoyed some of the field bean hummus for lunch and froze the rest (Photo 3). This first batch was just plain hummus but we will be trying other flavours (e.g. chillies, smoked paprika, coriander, soy sauce) to later batches.

Photo 3: Field Bean Hummus with Olive Oil Drizzle Ready for Freezing (June 2026)