How to Eat Edamame the Right Way
By Becky Hughes. Photo by: Gentl & Hyers.
Edamame: they're fun to eat, fun to say, and surprisingly easy to incorporate into your normal rotation of meals. Edamame are young soybeans—at this stage, the young beans are soft and easy to eat, while older ones (which are used used for soy milk and tofu) are hard and darker in color. As young beans, edamame come in fibrous pods, which, as you may have learned at a sushi restaurant at some point, are seriously tough and inedible.
While getting the little beans out of the pod is an extra step that you don't have with, say, snap peas, these protein-rich bad boys are well worth the work. Here's how to eat edamame—shelled, unshelled, blended, fried, and more.
Eat it as a snack
Sushi restaurants often serve edamame as an appetizer—it comes steamed in the shell topped with salt. To make it yourself, find fresh or, more readily available, frozen edamame in the shell and steam or boil until the pods are bright green and warmed through. Drain off excess water, and top with sea salt and maybe some black pepper.
To eat them, use your front teeth to scrape a bean out of the shell, one at a time—they should pop out quite easily.
Get this recipe: Peppery Edamame
Shell the beans and cook with them
Some stores sell frozen shelled edamame beans, which you can steam in a pot or in the microwave. If you can only find them in-shell, you'll have to cook them up that way and squeeze each bean out manually.
Once you have them shelled, add the beans to super-simple fried rice dinners, cheesy, herbaceous salads, protein-rich veggie burgers, and weekday stir-fries.
Mash the edamame into a puree
You can also use edamame the same way you would use green peas or other beans—like mashed on toast or whipped into homemade hummus, and controversial guacamole). If you're feeling especially creative, you can even throw edamame into your next batch of ice cream—it's a real testament to how delicious and versatile this little bean is.
This story originally appeared on Epicurious.
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