Ful Medames
Slow-cooked fava beans crushed with garlic, lemon, cumin and a great deal of olive oil — Egypt eats it for breakfast, and has done for a very long time.
Photograph credit: فول مصرى بالطحينة by Melaad2009 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence
Only half the beans should be crushed. Mashed smooth it is a dip; left whole it is a bowl of beans; the texture everyone actually wants is somewhere between, with enough broken bean to thicken the liquid and enough whole ones to eat. The olive oil goes in at the end and in a quantity that looks excessive, because it is what carries the cumin and garlic.
How to Make Ful Medames
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Tip the beans and their liquid into a pan and warm through over medium heat for 8 minutes.
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Add the garlic, cumin and salt and simmer 4 minutes more.
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Crush about half the beans against the side of the pan with a fork or a potato masher. Stop while plenty are still whole.
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Take off the heat and stir in the lemon juice and 3 tablespoons of the olive oil.
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Taste. It will want more salt and more lemon than you expect.
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Spoon into bowls, make a well in each and pour the remaining oil in.
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Top with tomato, onion, parsley, chilli flakes and the eggs (optional), and serve with flatbread and lemon wedges.
Related guide: Ingredient substitutions.
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Worth Getting Right
- Half-crushed, not mashed. This is the only decision that matters here.
- Keep the tin liquid — it is starchy and it is what makes the dish creamy rather than dry.
- The oil at the end should feel like too much. It is not.
Ingredient Swaps
- An eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder per clove is the stand-in usually given when you are out of fresh garlic; it will not brown the same way, and it burns easily, so add it with the liquid.
Pairs Well With
Flatbread, torn, as the only utensil · Sweet mint tea · Pickled turnips
Sides from the same cuisine on this site: Roz Mermah, Egyptian Rice with Vermicelli, Eish Merahrah.
Leftovers and Storage
Refrigerate up to 3 days. It thickens considerably; loosen with hot water when reheating and re-season with fresh lemon, which fades.
What's in a Serving
Per serving, an approximate calculation from the ingredient list. Treat it as a rough guide: part of the energy comes from foods, or weights per item, with no recorded source. How the figures are worked out.
Vegan when served without the hard-boiled eggs. Gluten-free when served without the flatbreads.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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