A recent post on our Instagram account has lead me down a nostalgic path. I've always been fortunate but looking back over the years, I had to work really hard to get so lucky!  (with the great Annie Sommerville from Greens Restaurant) People forget. I forget! In the early days, I sold the beans almost exclusively at farmers markets. I couldn't get into the Napa market (which was idiotic but a tale best saved for another time), so I did the Yountville, Calistoga, and St Helena markets in Napa. I quickly expaned to the Grand Lake market in Oakland and...

It has been a long time since I played in the garden. I have not been a good steward of my land and as we got busier and busier over the holiday season, I left my precious Oaxacan runner beans to fend for themselves. We experienced a very wet season, followed by several nights with freezing temperatures and the mornings have been foggy. You would have thought my forgotten bean crop would be a goner, but you'd be wrong. Mid-February and this is my harvest. I looked and I saw a few funky pods. When I opened them, the beans...

At one point, I looked out on to the crowd, smiling, thinking, "Beans. Beans did this." How did I go from being the loneliest fellow at the farmer's markets to calling for a party and having it be packed with a steady stream of Rancho Gordo enthusiasts for two hours? How did we pull off making our own dried nixtamal? How did we pull off publishing our own books when we were feeling burned by the traditional publishing houses? How did this happen? The Rancho Gordo Pozole Book by Steve Sando was officially released on November 8, 2019 I'm also...

I almost hate to bring it up because everyone has such a strong opinion about it but normally I don't soak. Sometimes I do. I really think the best beans come from very low and slow cooking after a strong 15 minute boil. Soaking can help speed things up and some claim it helps the texture. I'm not sold, but I have no problem with people who insist on soaking, unless they say something like "soak for 24 hours". Soaked Royal Corona heirloom beans (left) and unsoaked 8 hours, and right out of the package (right). I soaked my Royal...

Every year we like to share our ebooklet, Rancho Gordo Thanksgiving. Whether you go all indigenous ingredient or just use it as a source of inspiration, it's yours and you can download it here, now. I used to think Thanksgiving was no big deal but now that I'm old and wise, I love it. No presents, good food and at my table, no politics, especially this year. I am not much of a traditionalist so focusing on our New World heritage is much more interesting to me than a green bean casserole, but I understand the appeal of it all.

For years I'd heard of fagioli al fiasco. Small white beans like the famous Zolfini from Tuscany were placed in an empty wine bottle with olive oil and herbs and then placed in the smoldering embers of a wood fire. I finally tracked down a terra cotta pot that did this and the results were great, but the opaque clay made it hard to know what was going on inside and clean up felt a bit risky. Out of the blue, my online pal Robin Lynch sent me this glass version. I'm sure it's treated laboratory style glass but the...

Hello, gorgeous! It's that time of year where the flowers aren't going to turn into beans any time soon and the cold weather is on the way . These runner bean flowers are better served in other ways. For me, scrambled eggs with Hatch chiles seemed like a reasonable idea. I was right.

Sunday mornings mean lots of slow cooking and hummingbird watching. I try and get out and do something but the idea of hanging out all day in my home with the kids is more appealing. While I'm watching the clouds roll by, I'm often making some staples for the week, like beans and rice. I can use them for Sunday supper and the leftover can be used throughout the week. I had a big pot of Lila beans cooking and used some of them later for a soup. Lila beans are juicy and velvety and pretty much everything a person...

This is from Bianca in our San Francisco store. It's pretty cool: I had a wonderful experience that I thought I would share. A mother and son came in to the store and were very excited about the Teparies. They were conversing back and forth in Spanish and were very animated. Finally the son asked me if the Teparies were called something else. Not knowing, we looked in the RG Bean Growers guide. The gentleman shared with me that he and his mother were reminded of a bean that they had from their home area of Mexico- in the North....

A few years ago I did one of those farm to table dinners and it featured our beans. I loved sitting at the end of a long white table with fellow producers and eager diners. But then I sampled what a seemingly knowledgeable chef had done with our beans. I wanted to run in shame! They were about 40 minutes short of being fully cooked. In his head, al dente meant good. It may be good for pasta or snap peas but beans need to be fully cooked, for texture, flavor and digestibility. The March 2016 Vegetarian Times has an...