Rancho Gordo Beans, or, justifying a bicoastal diet
By Karina | June 24, 2009
I have been intrigued by Rancho Gordo and their wide variety of heirloom beans for a while, and a few weeks ago I bit the bullet and went ahead and ordered a whole bunch of them. Maybe it was this thrilling article from the NYTimes? Maybe it was the idea of getting a more steady vegetable based protein in my diet, because now I live part time now with a couple of little dudes who think beans are disgusting and just like baby poo and gross and oh hey where’s my hamburger/hot dog?
Anyway, the beans came in yesterday and it was so exciting to unpack the beans. It was even more exciting to cook them, especially when it turns out that the chestnut lima beans? are the most amazing and incredible beans I’ve ever eaten – SO FAR. I say so far because there’s still eight more varieties in the package I ordered. SO EXCITING. Also exciting is the fact that I actually made delicious and edible beans from dried, something I’ve never ever been able to do before.
Over dinner I was thinking about these beans, and how much I loved them. And then I thought about how I could write about them for Tiny Choices, and I realized I might have to justify my beans in an environmental context! Because when it comes down to it, these beans are transported via ground UPS from Napa California all the way to Southen New York State. That’s a long way. And it’s kind of in direct odds with my summertime CSA lifestyle, which is pretty profoundly locavore (except for spices, and the occasional tomato or onion, which aren’t quite in season yet).
So over dinner, my partner and I came up with this list of why it’s totally green to buy dried beans from California and ship them quite literally across the country:
- I’m not any good at making dried beans that are already in the local grocery store. Rancho Gordo tells me it’s not me, it’s the beans – they’re way too old to cook well. I’ll take it.
- Because I can’t make dried beans (that are already in the local grocery store), I buy a lot of canned beans, which are heavier to transport than dried beans.
- Rancho Gordo, at least, searches out esoteric beans in Mexico and raises them all locally – i.e., they’re coming from Napa California, not all over the world. One of the reasons to start Rancho Gordo was the inability of the founder to find locally sourced staples.
- Also these are heirloom varieties, not the monoculture types that big agriculture promotes so hard. Supporting biodiversity always wins!
The reasons that they are NOT good come down to the distance traveled, which, frankly, is something that is embodied in most food eaten in America – both organic AND traditional.
Regardless of the food-miles, I have to say that these heirloom beans were so delicious that I don’t think I’ll be able to go back to other beans. Seriously, so delicious.
What do you think? Are these (unscientific and unjustified) points sensible to you?
Topics: Food | 13 Comments »
Your points are entirely reasonable. Plus, add in the BPA in the can lining of canned beans and your argument becomes even more solid (to me, anyway :)
You’ve made me reconsider the high price of beans I’ve recently seen for sale at the Union Square farmers market– ostensibly locally grown, and very pricey, and until now I couldn’t justify the cost (considering that the idea of cooking beans from a dried state unreasonably terrifies me)… but now I think I’ll give them a shot. Hey, if nothing else, it’s another TC post on dried beans!
oh, you should let me know about those Union Square beans! I would love to try some locally grown ones too, it would really cut down on, like, ALL of my “cons” for the rancho gordo beans.
you can borrow the cookbook, with easy/straightforward directions for cooking dried beans!
I’m a HUGE Rancho Gordo fangirl, too! And I swear that every variety I’ve tried have been the most amazing beans ever. Freshness really makes a difference in dried beans! I’m due for a new order myself, I just ran out of my very favorite runner cannelini beans, and I made an incredible white bean dip out of it a couple weeks ago, and now I want to make more, and I know that what I can buy at the store is just not going to cut it!! We eat a lot of beans at our house, too, and it’s really worth it to splurge for the good stuff – it’s still less expensive/resource intensive than an equivalent meal including meat.
Oh, and here’s my white bean dip, just in case you got some of the runner beans in your package. :)
http://thewholekitchen.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-new-favorite-lunch-white-bean-dip.html
Dude, you are grasping at straws to justify this. I have no idea what the problem is with cooking dried beans. I have no problem with it at all -maybe my beans taste horrid and I just don’t notice. I’m cooking up a bunch tonight that I got on my trip to Ohio. So even if you were not going to have grocery store beans, you could still find beans closer than California. Rancho Gordo sounds great – I will definitely check it out. Good beans are so important, I think it’s okay to splurge a bit on the environmental costs, especially when it is an anomaly.
it’s true, I was definitely grasping at straws. I need to find some local beans and see how they taste – previously I’ve had ZERO luck cooking dried beans, probably because they were super old beans from the grocery store, I guess. I have been hitting up local farmers markets and will be scouring for dried beans!
Karina – Local beans are nearly as good as Rancho Gordo – we’ve got one local bean producer who grows black turtle beans, and they’re fantastic…but that’s the only kind I’ve been able to find locally in Chicago. The importance with dried beans is mostly that they be FRESH. And you just don’t know if what the grocery store has is from 1 or 5 years ago.
I definitely need to find something like that! I am going to be stalking the local farmers markets and looking around.
I was just reading the Rancho Gordo guide for cooking beans (http://www.ranchogordo.com/html/rg_cook_beans_primer.htm), and I’m curious about the section about cooking the beans with the soaking water:
I have always soaked my beans, dumped the water, then soaked them again and dumped that water too before cooking. Did you cook yours with the soaking water? If so, did you notice any change in the, well, amount of gas?
I usually stick to cooking lentils for this reason, but I would love to cook more beans!
to be honest, I always have a fair amount of, well, gas during vegetable season. the rancho gordo guy says in his cookbook that he thinks anyone who goes from a lower fiber diet to eating bowls of beans will see an obvious (and I guess to some alarming) increase in gas levels.
last night we cooked the beans with the soaking water but I didn’t notice any more or less gas!
Is there any way possible to know how old dried beans in the grocery store are? And do you think dried beans in bulk from natural food stores might be fresher due to higher turnover? I always cook my beans in a crock pot, slow, but I do notice sometimes beans take longer than other times for same kind of beans in same crock pot?? And because I don’t always buy organic dry beans, I always throw away the soaking water, hoping that I might throw away some of the pesticides too???
Thanks for the mention in this blog entry!
I struggle with the localvore issue a lot. I would encourage anyone anywhere to grow beans if they can. It’s fun and romantic. But growing them commercially isn’t practical everywhere and I’ve come to some peace thinking grains should be grown where they grow best, meat and dairy should be regional and vegetables and fruits need to be local. Shipping beans or rice via truck or slow boat isn’t the same issue as Fedex’ing a squash blossom from California to New York. Or winter cherries from Chile to Georgia.
Of course we all have to do what we can and do what feels right in our circumstances.
I think the most important thing is that we all keep talking about it, without anger and with open minds, and see where things go.
I think your site is a step in the right direction!
thanks Steve for the comment! I meant to email you this post but it totally slipped my mind… I agree, we are entirely about the talking and open minds!
I know when I get dried beans from the grocery store I have to cook them forever to get them to soften up. If your RG beans cook up faster perhaps you’re saving some energy too?
Hmm, I’ll have to see if I can find local dried beans for MD. We do have a farm at the market that grows and sells fresh beans. They set up a table lined with coolers, all of them filled with different beans (in the spring it’s a cooler of fresh shelled peas!). I’ll admit, a huge glistening pile of black beans is incredibly gorgeous!