Steve Sando's bean revolution advances with a new cookbook showing their versatility

NEW YORK -- Stop by Steve Sando's house for dinner and, if you're lucky, he might hand you a shot glass with a warm, murky liquid topped with a little onion, oregano and lemon juice. Bottoms up! You've just knocked back some bean broth.

“If you’ve cooked beans, you already have a sort of free soup,” says Sando from his home in Napa, California. “It's just this little hot thing to start the meal. It’s like you’re starting out on a good foot.”

Sando is something of a bean evangelist and has found a flourishing national appetite for his dried heritage beans, which are preserved in the Americas and passed down through generations. They are favored for their flavor, variety and even the broth they kick off.

Once a niche market, sacks of his heirloom beans fetch up to $8 a pound and have attracted 30,000 people on a waitlist to get quarterly shipments via his company, Rancho Gordo.

“It’s a secret that was right under our nose," he says. "I’m the one who got obsessed about it, but beans have always been here. I mean, every culture, every civilization, has some kind of legumes.”

Sando's latest cookbook, “The Bean Book,” with Julia Newberry, shows off the versatility of the little guys, from a Moroccan Chickpea Tagine to a Cheesy Black Bean and Corn Skillet Bake to a Clay-Baked Cod Gratin with Onions and White Beans. The flavors incorporate tastes from Tunisia, Costa Rica, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Iran and, of course, New England.

It's a mind-blowing experience to anyone familiar only with cans of black beans or chickpeas from the supermarket, bland fingernail-sized beans that have been soaked and canned and whose juice is quickly poured down the drain.

“I prefer heirloom beans that have been lovingly grown,” he says. “I try not to judge people after buying commodity beans because they’re still pretty fabulous.”

How to cook them

Beans are the ultimate slow food and Sando recommends soaking them for 2–6 hours, sauteeing garlic or some onion in a pot before adding the soaked beans and simmering for at least 2 more hours. You can tell if the beans are ready to eat if you remove one, blow on it and the skin wrinkles.

Adding chicken broth or a hunk of pork into the pot as the beans simmer is a no-no until you've enjoyed the heirloom beans for what they are. Adding meat just turns it into a meat dish, he argues.

“I just think there’s this a-ha moment you have when you have a killer bowl,” he says. “And you have to work so hard to mess up a pot of beans.”

“The Bean Book,” with contributions from chefs like Staffan Terje and Faith Kramer, is a place to celebrate the more obscure varieties Sando curates, ones with fabulous names like Eye of the Goat, Whipple and Scarlet Runner. Some are strikingly beautiful, like Christmas Lima or Snowcap, almost begging to be put in a glass jar as a countertop decoration.

Where beans belong: just about everywhere

Beans in the book have a way of ending up in all sorts of places, from salads and sauces to braises and on toast, as supporting players or the spotlight. Sando even finds a place for them in a dish of clams and Spanish chorizo, assembling all three main ingredients only in the final moments.

“The chorizo starts to render its own fat into the bean broth, and it’s like it becomes something even better than it was where it had been sitting for hours,” he says. “I actually think taking separate components and only letting them get to know each other for a few minutes is better.”

Sando also enters the heated debate over whether or not proper chili should contain beans. He respects Texans' aversion to beans in their chili, but suggests adding big, beefy runner beans instead of meat to a dish with red chili powder, oregano, cumin, zucchini and corn.

“I’m proud of that recipe more than almost any of them, because it really took a lot of work and it took many, many tries,” he says. “I understand their concerns, but I think I really took the spirit of chili to heart with this one.”

Sando says he'll never forget the thrill he felt in 2001 after growing and then eating a bowl of simply cooked heirloom Rio Zapes, a pinto-like bean with a velvety texture that has trace flavors of coffee and chocolate.

“As someone who lives in Napa, where every obscure corner of European wine is known and European culture is quite well explored, I thought, ‘Well, these are actually indigenous to the Americas. And why does the average home cook not know what a Rio Zapes is?’”

Because beans take so long to be ready, Sando suggests the home cook prepare a pot of them and use them all week, maybe serve them with chicken thighs one day and then in a salad for the next and later puree them for a third dish.

He's also not against swapping one kind of bean for another in his dishes: “You can interchange them,” he says. “You don’t want to get too hung up on ‘I can only make this because I have this.’ You can experiment a little bit.”