Contents
Immature green soybeans, harvested before the sugars convert to starch and the pod hardens. A complete protein, sold frozen almost everywhere, and about the fastest thing you can add to a cold bowl — two to four minutes from freezer to ready.
Buying
- Frozen podded (shelled) — the practical choice for bowls. Straight into boiling water for 2–3 minutes, then ice water.
- Frozen in the pod — for eating as a snack with flaky salt. 4–5 minutes. The pod is not edible; it is a handle.
- Fresh in the pod is seasonal and worth buying when you see it.
Do not skip the cooking step. Raw soybeans contain trypsin inhibitors and lectins, and brief boiling deactivates them.
In cold food
- Ice-water shock immediately. It sets the colour and stops them going khaki and soft. This matters more for edamame than for most vegetables.
- Salt while warm. They take salt readily in the first minute out of the water and barely at all afterwards.
- They stay firm and bright in a dressed bowl for days, which is unusual — most green vegetables do not.
Keeping
Frozen, a year. Cooked, 4 days refrigerated.
Notes
Elsewhere on the site
Used in: poke bowl · cold soba bowl
Related: tofu · soy sauce · Glycine Max (growing) · Top Ten Most Commonly Eaten Legumes in the World
Keeps in the cupboard
Unopened, 12 months.
| As sold | Unopened, in the cupboard | Once opened |
|---|---|---|
| salted, dry roasted, out of pod | 12 months | — |
Counted from the date on the package. Figures are the USDA FSIS FoodKeeper table's, for unopened storage at room temperature; FoodKeeper counts a month as 30 days.
The table was not pulled from USDA — fsis.usda.gov answers 403 to non-browser clients from this machine — so it came from a mirror of the data.gov dataset and its vintage is unverified. Treat a single figure as indicative, not as a use-by date.
See Keeps 60 days or more for the rest of the long shelf.