From the founder of the acclaimed Rancho Gordo bean company, an authoritative guide to 50 bean varieties and how to cook with them, featuring 100 classic and modern recipes. Learn how easy it is to cook beans from scratch with the king of beans. Rancho Gordo beans, the legumes with a cult following and Bean Club waiting list more than 20,000 names long, brought attention to heirloom bean varieties through chefs like Thomas Keller and Marcella Hazan. Founder and owner Steve Sando, with twenty-five years'' experience in growing, sourcing, and cooking with beans, is the perfect home cook to present classic recipes as well as new combinations for all kinds of eaters. With more than 100 recipes, there are vegan and vegetarian dishes like Fennel, Potato, and White Bean Soup with Saffron and Pizza Beans as well as full-on meat-lovers'' meals like Napa Valley Cassoulet , Southwestern Chile con Carne , and Clay-Baked Pacific Cod Gratin with Onions and White Beans . <The Bean Book< includes instructions for cooking beans using multiple methods, then transforming those cooked beans into satisfying dips, soups, salads, mains, sides, and desserts. There is nobody better than the man behind Rancho Gordo to share recipes, tips, and historical background in a beautifully photographed, comprehensive collection, sure to be a classic.

Autorentext
Steve Sando is the founder of Rancho Gordo, a specialty food company that grows and sources heirloom produce, seeds, and beans. He has been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Saveur, O Magazine, CBS Sunday Morning, and From the Source on the Magnolia Network. Julia Newberry is the general manager of Rancho Gordo and co-author of The Rancho Gordo Vegetarian Kitchen and The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Guide.

Klappentext

"From the founder of the acclaimed Rancho Gordo bean company, Steve Sando's authoritative presentation of 50 bean varieties and how to cook with them, from classic recipes to new takes"--

Zusammenfassung
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the founder of the acclaimed Rancho Gordo bean company, an authoritative guide to 50 bean varieties and how to cook with them, featuring 100 classic and modern recipes.

“The Bean Book is the magnum opus from the KING of heirloom beans!”—Ted Allen, host of Food Network’s Chopped
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“An absolute must-have for anyone who believes that beans can be every bit as magical as a spoonful of caviar.”—Chef José Andrés**

Learn how easy it is to cook beans from scratch with the king of beans. Rancho Gordo beans, the legumes with a cult following and Bean Club waiting list more than 20,000 names long, brought attention to heirloom bean varieties through chefs like Thomas Keller and Marcella Hazan.

Founder and owner Steve Sando, with twenty-five years’ experience in growing, sourcing, and cooking with beans, is the perfect home cook to present classic recipes as well as new combinations for all kinds of eaters. With more than 100 recipes, there are vegan and vegetarian dishes like Fennel, Potato, and White Bean Soup with Saffron and Pizza Beans as well as full-on meat-lovers’ meals like Napa Valley Cassoulet, Southwestern Chile con Carne, and Clay-Baked Pacific Cod Gratin with Onions and White Beans.

The Bean Book includes instructions for cooking beans using multiple methods, then transforming those cooked beans into satisfying dips, soups, salads, mains, sides, and desserts. There is nobody better than the man behind Rancho Gordo to share recipes, tips, and historical background in a beautifully photographed, comprehensive collection, sure to be a classic.

Leseprobe
**Introduction

Steve’s Story**

If your experience with beans started with red kidney beans from a can at a lonely salad bar in a dark, old-school pizzeria, it’s easy to understand your confusion about the recent popularity of beans. I remember—not so fondly—bowls of funky red kidneys, white navys, and mediocre garbanzos waiting to be paired with too-thick slices of cucumber, wilted lettuce, and over-seasoned and yet somehow bland “Italian” dressing.

Until recently, poor old beans hadn’t received a lot of love in the United States. It was thought by many that they were to be reserved for hard times, were hard to digest, required hours of painstaking preparation, and were better suited to old hippies who lived on communes. They certainly weren’t part of the mainstream American diet, and many of us didn’t give them a second thought, except for childish chants and poems about their non-culinary powers.

Things slowly started to change.

Like heirloom tomatoes, mostly forgotten varieties of beans that had thrived under the care of experienced home gardeners started to be grown commercially and were available at a lucky few farmers’ markets. Chefs embraced them and the crowds&#160;went along. Home cooks who only knew beans from cans started playing with heirloom and new-crop beans—and instead of being neglected, the beans were starting to be celebrated. It turns out that standard commodity supermarket beans are fine, but as with tomatoes, corn, or just about any vegetable, most modern varieties have been bred for yield and ease of harvesting. These are two important factors, clearly, but what about flavor and texture? For some growers, the goal is to produce as much as possible for the lowest price. Providing a cheap plant-based protein is admirable, but life is rarely an all-or-nothing proposition. Along with the commodity beans, why not explore the history, flavor, and nuance of lesser-known varieties?

I often tell a story about visiting an agriculture exposition at a university where they were able to show off the different breeding programs they were developing. One field had all white beans, another field had perfectly round beans, and yet another had plants that were easier to harvest by machine, and so on. I asked innocently how any of these breeding programs affected the flavor of the beans, and I was met with a blank stare. In five years of field trials, they had yet to cook a single pot of beans to see if the flavor changed, for better or worse.

The contemporary thinking was that it didn’t matter since you’d want to add rich chicken stock or a ham bone or another flavoring ingredient because beans on their own weren’t worth much. It’s similar to the comparison between acorn-fed pork from Spain (which only needs curing to be delicious) and factory-raised pork that is smothered in barbecue sauce, in part to make up for the lack of flavor in the pork. Both are acceptable, but I’m much more interested in quality ingredients and cooking them with minimal fuss to allow their natural flavor to come through.

No longer the bland, chalky kidney beans in that salad bar of long ago, the beans we have available today are gaining cultlike status, and demand for all sizes and colors and shapes continues to grow.

My story with beans starts with me turning forty and almost giving up. I had been an almost-successful serial entrepreneur, and I thought I’d reached the end of the line. I was prepared to get a bad job at a big-box store and start a garden. I’d done a little gardening, and my instincts told me that if I had a garden, things would work out somehow. I was right. I started growing and taking things to the farmers’ market, and I never got around to that bigbox store job. The early internet was especially kind to farmers and gardeners interested in buying and trading seeds, and I’ll never forget the thrill of growing beans and finally tasting a pot of Rio Zapes at the end of the season. The flavor and look was similar to the pintos I liked, but there was som…