Title: The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Grower*s Guide: Steve Sando*s 50 Favorite Varieties
Publisher: Timber Press
Publication Date: 2011
Language: English
ISBN 10: 1604691026
ISBN 13: 9781604691023
Binding: Paperback
Condition: New
Book Type: book

About this title

Synopsis

Steve Sando founded Rancho Gordo with the simple idea that saving our New World foods is a critical pursuit, and his passion for heirloom beans has made his business a huge success. Sando’s beans are sought after by famous chefs like Thomas Keller (Vallarta is his favorite), and he’s frequently profiled in publications such as Bon Appetit, Saveur, and the New York Times.

In The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Grower's Guide, Sando invites the gardener and home cook to share his passion, profiling the fifty best beans to grow, cook, and save. From the silky flavor of Good Mother Stallard to the buttery Runner Cannellinis, the most delicious varieties are presented in these pages along with growing tips, flavor notes, stories of their heritage, and beautiful photographs that showcase the unique beauty of each bean.

In reintroducing the best of the New World heirloom beans, Sando has created a sensation, and food-lovers everywhere will relish transforming this humble staple into a celebrated delicacy.

About the Author

In a few short years, Steve Sando has taken the lowly bean from a neglected legume to superstar-status ingredient. Sando’s company, Rancho Gordo, grows, imports, and promotes heirloom and heritage varieties while working directly with consumers and chefs like Thomas Keller, Deborah Madison, Paula Wolfert, and David Kinch.

Sando’s seed saving, bean production, and marketing efforts provide professional and home chefs with heirloom beans that would otherwise have been lost to history. The beans, along with corn, chiles, and tomatoes, have become key ingredients in the new American food revolution centered in Sando’s native San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, Sando and Rancho Gordo were named number two on Saveur Magazine’s “The Saveur 100 list for 2008.” Bon Appetit magazine declared Sando one of the Hot 10 in the food world of 2009. Food + Wine magazine placed Steve “at the forefront of the current seed-saving movement.” Steve’s previous book, with Vanessa Barrington, was Heirloom Beans (Chronicle, 2008).

Steve Sando came to agriculture not from the 4H club but from the grocery store. As a frustrated home cook, he decided to grow the ingredients he wanted in his kitchen. At the forefront of neglected ingredients were beans. Although they are an indigenous product of the Americas, the only beans available commercially to most home cooks were pintos, navies, and kidneys. Discovering heirloom beans to be as rich and varied as heirloom tomatoes, Sando almost singlehandedly created the market for these unique and worthwhile legumes. He now grows more than 25 varieties in California and works with small indigenous farmers in Mexico to import their heirloom beans for the U.S. market. He lives in Napa and travels frequently throughout the Americas collecting beans, friends, and adventures.

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