Rancho Gordo Makes Saveur 100

[chezcherie]

i hope i haven't missed a previous post, but was delighted to see the feb 08 issue of saveur feature eG's own rancho gordo:

2 Lovely Legumes

"Beans shouldn't need to be cooked with a ham hock to taste good," says Steve Sando, the founder of RANCHO GORDO, a California company that sells a wide range of heirloom beans indigenous to the Americas. We couldn't agree more. The dizzying array of colorful, and colorfully named, legumes that Sando's company offers have distinctive flavors and rich textures that make the beans stars in their own right. Rancho Gordo's mantequilla beans, for instance, are beefy and buttery; its big, fat good mother stallards taste smoky and slightly piquant; and its vallartas, a variety on the verge of extinction before Sando rediscovered it, possess a luxuriously smooth texture. It's no surprise that savvy cooks are clamoring for Sando's beans. The in-house chefs at the California headquarters of Google, Rancho Gordo's biggest customer, order hundreds of pounds of them a week. Now you know what they know: being full of beans is a wonderful thing.