Thanks for the link. Have loved his beans for years and wouldn’t eat anything but RG beans. They cook so beautifully, not grainy, no burst outs, very creamy, each with its own distinctive aroma and taste. I mostly use pintos and blacks but when I do make chili or baked beans I like to use 5 or 6 dif varieties. Thank you Steve Sando!!
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thanks
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So I actually checked with Steve for recommendations for a wild boar & beans dish & he said he’d recommend that you cook the wild boar by whatever method you’d prefer and serve the beans as a side dish. Said any of the beans would work well with the boar but thought Albuia Blancas might be a particularly nice choice.
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thanks
I do nto know what happened, which of my answer got returned
Here it is again
I definitely hit reply, the green button with the arrow to the left
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This really very simple bean soup (marcella recipe!) is what i love to do with rancho gordo beans, it lets them take center stage. Crusty bread is best alongside to get every bit of the tasty broth. I made this once for my bean-adverse family using homemade veg broth (broth had a lot of fennel tops and a parm rind) and they all cleaned the bowls.
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I really need to make this, I even have some RG Marcella beans I got recently and haven’t tried yet. Hmm, soak today, cook tomorrow…
Sounds like it was meant to be!
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Beans… some of us have an unhealthy love for the infinite diversity of beans. A fellow bean-geek is Russ Crow. I’ve got too many types for a normal life, as well. Hopefully, Steve of Rancho Gordo can avoid going down the endless rabbit-hole of bean collecting. If he does, I know a lot of enablers!
Here’s my all-time favorite, Dr. Martin Lima. It’s a giant, sweet butter bean. No, it’s not a potato-type, unless over matured. It’s sweet and crazy rare.
When I grow it, the trellis needs to be at least eight feet tall. The vines are spaced three FEET apart in rows. Very few still keep this heirloom going. There are numerous tricks to its culture.
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Oh my gosh! Those are crazy huge…! Is a serving like, 3 beans? I love those big white butter beans that seem to be served in tomato sauce at italian restaurants, this looks like their grand daddy
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These beans are so delicious and tender, all we ever do is steam them, serve with a little butter and salt. The pods are very thick and huge, it’s hard to tell when the beans are ready. So, I use a strong flashlight or hold pods up to the sun to “candle” them, see the light shadow. If you wait until pods yellow, they are over mature.
Unlike Mexican beans, Limas prefer cooler weather to set well. Once it goes into the 90s F (32+C), they tend to go sterile. Peru is thought to be where the large-seeded types originated.
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I ordered several kinds of beans and several bags of their oregano to get free S/H
The first one I will try is chili
so, do you suggest I soak them overnight and cook them separately from the venison ( I will use venison )?
Aside from 6 lbs of tarbais for my duck confit casserole , I also 1 lb each of royal corona, eye of the goat, santa maria and cranberry.
Do u suggest I use the mixture ( except tarbais)
I usually use black beans, corn, pinto beans for my chili
thanks, it has not arrived yet so, i had just cooked a big pot of pork chops and chicken adobo and in the next day, I am going to cook D’artagnan’s wild boar Italian stew ( my son’s request, and the next meal would be chili . I generally cook a big pot of something as son eats every few hours so he can eat between meals .
thanks
For dry beans, you’ve got several options. Some folks brine beans, but I’m keeping my salt under control, so don’t usually use that method. Be sure to follow brining recipes carefully, it’s possible to “case harden” beans, making them near impossible to cook soft.
The overnight soak is tried and true, but usually produces less flavorful beans with more gas producing compounds. I dump out the soak water and rinse them. Some authors refuse to remove any bean soak water because of losing “valuable nutrients”. Some of those valuable nutrients are indigestible carbs. which can cause gas and bloating as bacteria in your gut have a field day digesting what you cannot.
An easy and better method is the quick soak. Put beans in a pot and cover with at least three inches of water. Bring to a boil and cook for 2-5 minutes. Shut off the stove and cover the pot. Leave the beans to soak in the hot water for 1-6 hours (test them periodically ). Times vary with size, type of bean. I discard the water. Cook further, as needed in the recipe. This method does cook beans quickly. Yeah, Diana Kennedy freaks out at tossing the water, but trust me, there’s plenty of goodness inside those beans and the water is full of gas-factor. People have different tolerances for these bacteria-feeding compounds; they are, however, probiotic! (Maybe in a less than elegant way.) If there is a lot of dissolved material in the water and you soaked-cooked a little too much (bean broth), you might want to use that water, or part of it, if it will help the recipe. Bean skins are also indigestible, being mostly fiber. Again, each bean is different. Practice and keep records.
Cooking mixed beans will have mixed results; they cook at different rates. As an extreme, if you cook Black Turtle beans and yellow Cebo Cela as a mix, the Cebo Cela will be mush and dissolving before the Black beans are tender. Mixes work best if the beans have similar cook times.
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many thanks
I usually soak overnight, discard water away and boil them
I will try your method and just use one kind of bean to start with
Someone recommended different beans but i think you are correct in that different beans have different cook time, and so, i will start with a single bean.
I will keep record
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I ordered a variety of beans from RG over 10 years ago. They were very pretty but of course once cooked, they lose most if not all of their pattern and color. I’ve never smoked, so unless my taste perception is congenitally deficient, customers who rave over the superiority of RG beans are, largely, fooling themselves. I suspect the results of blind taste tests would reveal a lot of naked emperors. 
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I agree. I can’t tell the difference between Rancho Gordo beans and random bulk bin Whole Food beans. Which might be because I’m not discerning enough, or…because there’s no discernible differnce.
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Oh yeah, I get that. I’m way too cheap to pay $7/lb plus shipping for pintos or similar. I get dried pintos for $.50/lb.
But I do respect and admire the effort he’s put into saving the rare and disappearing varietals.
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Or something in between?
I don’t have Whole Foods where I live. I’m looking for fast turover, which I think means fresher beans that cook more predictably. Is that not right? I can get that with Mexican beans here, but RD has more than that. And it’s more local than Whole Foods!
I used to cook beans many different ways. Until I met a older Hispanic man who made these fantastic beans. I asked him what his secret was. It was bottled water that he cooked the beans in. I have been using this method since. No soaking, no pre-soak. Put them in the pot and cook them. Something to do with the pH in the water.
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I can believe that. There are professional bread bakers who strongly recommend using spring water for the loaves made with their recipes.
Well, I bought about $80.00 to save on shipping , awaiting its arrival.
I will know when they arrive and i make my first batch of chili and duck confit casserole if they are worth it.
However, at least I know I can get 6 pounds of tarbais beans for 6.99 /lb.
I was too cheap to buy them for $20-$30/lb when I need 3 lbs for my D’artagnan’s duck confit recipe which I cook once or twice a year. They retail for $19.99/lb from D’artagnan. I wander if they buy it from Gordo Rancho as there was one Christmas when D’artagnan was having a special for Duck Confit Casserole for about $150.00. That was for the duck, sausages, ventrich.duck fat, duck and veal glaze, 3 lbs of tarbais beans etc, all in their recipe including the terra cotta pot and shipping. I wandered how they can afford that? At any rate, I had duck legs confit in my freezer, googled found them between $20-30/lb. I had always used Whole Foods white cannelloni beans for my recipe.
Now, it make sense that D’artagnan may have purchased ti from Rancho Gordo for less than $6.99 as I found a coop 1hour from me that retails it for $5.99/lb.
If I find that the tarbais is superior to the cannelloni beans, then I will just buy tarbais beans from them in a year or so when I use up all my 6 pounds ( 2 recipes) of tarbais beans
Thanks for everyone’s input!
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