Unless you’re on a media blackout, I suspect you know that today would have been Julia Child’s 100th birthday. She lived a long life–she died nine years ago at 91 years of age–and I have to admit to shedding a few tears for her even though I never knew her personally–because she is one of my greatest influences.

She found her path, and nothing deterred her once she began moving forward. She just kept forging her way, guided by passion and love, and in doing so, changed the way Americans view food, cooking and eating forever.

Without Julia, I doubt there would be locavores.

The Slow Food movement would undoubtedly have started in Italy, but would it have come to America if we hadn’t been schooled by Julia? Maybe not.

And I doubt that there would be as many women in professional kitchens today if we hadn’t all grown up seeing Julia cook her heart out on television before God and everybody.

God bless her–we need more like her. (And truly, I think we have many, many more like her, following in her footsteps each and every day. People learning to grow, cook, eat and preserve good food seem to be popping up everywhere like porcini mushrooms after a rainstorm.)

To celebrate, PBS put together a video–”Julia Remixed.”

Here it is, so we can all celebrate together.

And remember: “Life itself is the proper binge.”

Long time readers probably know that I love to cook with yogurt, and that it appears in a great many of my recipes. I use it in mashed potatoes, curries, baked goods, pancakes, sauces, cheese dishes and lots of cold salads and raitas. It is, in fact a staple in my kitchen, so right before I started writing this blog again, I had decided to take up making my own yogurt.

I’d been told it was simple to do, and the results were better than what you can buy at the store, and generally cheaper.

Now, I have to cop to being very picky about my yogurt. I use whole milk Greek yogurt, which is strained, thus making it thicker and creamier in texture, and my preferred brand is Fage. But, I knew that the milk the folks at Fage was still from CAFO dairy cows, who are fed God-only-knows-what and are treated pretty abominably. I really wanted to use our delicious local Snowville Creamery milk that is from cows who eat grass, hay and the tiniest amount of grain, who are never fed bovine growth hormone, and who are beautiful and lovingly cared for on fields very close to my home.

The milk from cows who eat grass is structurally different from the milk from cows who eat grain and God-knows-what-all, and it is healthier for us. Snowville cream and milk are what my family drinks, so it made sense to switch over to making yogurt from their milk if I was serious about making sure to give my family the best food possible.

So, I had to take up yogurt making.

And, it really isn’t all that hard, but it isn’t something that you can kind of do slapdash and get really good results. Remember, I’m picky about my yogurt. I like it thick, tart, and creamy, so I had to work a bit to get the good results I wanted.

But the work was worth it and I can pass on what I learned to my readers and make your putative journey into cultured milk products a bit smoother than my own was. (Because, yes, readers, I DID screw up a couple of batches of yogurt. Yep. I was very sad I had no hogs to feed it to, just some cats, because two quarts worth if ick yogurt is too much for kitties to eat!)

So, first of all, let’s talk about tools.

The first and most important tool you need for making yogurt is NOT a yogurt maker.

It’s a good, accurate food thermometer. Preferably with temperatures marked in five or ten degree chunks. Or a good digital thermometer. I have a Taylor that goes from 0 to 220 degrees–for yogurt you only need it to go to 160 degrees F. but you won’t find a probe thermometer that stops at 160, so don’t worry about it. It’s not a digital thermometer–I don’t love those because you cannot calibrate some of them, so I stick with the good old fashioned ones with the dial on them.

To calibrate a thermometer with a dial, check and see if there is a hex nut on the back where the probe meets up with the dial. If it’s there, you can test and calibrate it. Do this by setting up a glass of ice water and sticking the probe into it. It should read after a few seconds, exactly 32 degrees F. If it’s off by a bit in either direction, you will notice on the probe’s plastic cover (which you should always use when you’re not using your thermometer) a plastic hex wrench–a cut out the same size and shape as the hex nut–so you use that to move the dial up or down to get it to 32 degrees. Pretty neat, huh? You will find that right out of the package, your thermometer may be off by a degree or three in either direction, sometimes as much as five degrees.

Just calibrate it and get ready to play with milk.

Other necessary tools: a heavy bottomed pot that holds at least four quarts of milk–that would be a gallon. No, we are not going to make a gallon of yogurt at a time, but we going to be stirring two quarts of milk in this pot rather vigorously, and then whisking it, and you will make less of a mess if your pot is only half full than if it’s about to boil over.

A whisk. Self explanatory. A wooden or plastic spoon. A metal ladle and a four cup capacity liquid measuring cup.

If you are going to strain your yogurt to make good Greek style yogurt, may I suggest that you obtain a bag made of fine cloth for doing so. I tried using cheesecloth and it was MESSY, and it let too many milk solids out with the whey, so I got frustrated and got some unbleached finely woven 100 percent cotton muslin at the local quilt shop–but you can get it in any fabric store–and sewed myself up some bags a little smaller than a standard pillowcase, and prewashed them, then hung them to dry. I use my bags inside out to keep the fraying bits of cotton on the seams from getting into the yogurt. You can also use a cotton pillowcase–lots of people on the ‘net suggest that. I just didn’t have any extra ones laying around.

But whatever you do–don’t do the cheesecloth thing–it will annoy the bejeezus out of you, and you will end up with far less yogurt in the end than you should, because lots of it will seep out of the cheesecloth no matter how many times you prewash it and how many layers you use.

Oh, and you need something to culture your yogurt in.

Here’s where a yogurt maker can come to play. You can use an electric one, but I don’t love them. They tend to use little tiny jars to make your yogurt in, but I use it in cooking, so I want to make lots of yogurt at a time. But if you want to make it to replace those little fruity cups of yogurt you buy in the store, then maybe the electric version with the wee jars is for you. We’re all different.

Or, you can use just a plain old two-quart glass jar with a towel wrapped around it placed inside an oven with a pilot light lit, or a warming oven, or a preheated 110 degree F. oven which is then turned off or inside a parked car, or in a styrofoam cooler with lots of towels wrapped tightly around it to keep it warm, or inside a thermos bottle with a towel wrapped around it set in a styrofoam cooler. All of these methods work, but I found that I got annoyed at keeping tabs on the temperature.

See, yogurt needs a temperature of about 110 degrees F. for about 8-15 hours to culture. And while all of these methods do work, they can require some fussing and futzing, and I got annoyed at all of that.

So, how did I decide to make my yogurt if I don’t like electric yogurt makers or the jar and towel in some insulated warming device methods? Did I do it in a crockpot? No, that bugged me, too. I wanted to do it without electricity if I possibly could because that just makes sense to me. (Being without power after the derecho storm for days probably had something to do with it, too.)

I decided to use a Yogotherm yogurt maker, which doesn’t use electricity, makes up to two quarts of yogurt at a time, and works much better than the jury-rigged methods I tried before I got it.

It’s a simple thing, really. A BPA food grade plastic bucket with a lid and a handle to hold the culturing milk, and a Styrofoam inner layer that the bucket fits very tightly to for insulation, and an easily wiped clean styrene outer layer that provides easy cleaning and looks nice and lasts longer than Styrofoam, because it’s tough and not apt to be destroyed by five year olds and cats.

No moving parts, no heating elements, and all easily washable.

I highly recommend it.

And then, you need milk.

I say that you should buy the best milk you can buy. I use whole milk, and I sometimes add extra cream for extra richness, but good whole milk will do fine for the first time.

Good milk, and oh, yes, some yogurt culture.

Now, you might be able to hike down to your natural food store and pick up a box of culture. Or, you can pick out your favorite natural unflavored brand of yogurt and use it–lots of people swear by Stonyfield for having the most live active cultures in any commercial yogurt.

Or, you can order some online from Cultures for Health. They have lots of different specific strains of yogurt culturing bacteria in freeze-dried form, and they give explicit instructions on how to activate them and whether or not they can be used serially to make new batches of yogurt from the previously made batch.

I did a combination of both methods: using commercial yogurt and two cultures from Cultures for Health–I chose a combination of Fage and Stonyfield yogurt and a combination of both Greek and Bulgarian culture strains. I added each one singly and ended up blending them together to come up with a really tangy, rich yogurt with good flavor and texture.

To use commercial yogurt as your starter, just follow my directions. To use Cultures For Health’s starters, first follow the directions they provide for activating the starter (basically you make a small amount of yogurt) and then following my directions, make a full batch of yogurt.

There are a couple of caveats I’m going to mention before I give the recipe/formula for the yogurt.

One–it is absolutely essential to heat the milk up to at least 160 degrees F. but no hotter than 180 degrees F. Yogurt cultures need milk between 90-110 degrees F. to work, but don’t think you’re being smart by only heating your milk up to 110 degrees and putting in your cultures and letting it go. IT WON’T WORK.

You need to heat the milk up to 160-180 degrees F. to denature the proteins in the milk so that when it cools off and the yogurt culture is added, it will turn into a nice, smooth, creamy, delicious dairy product that you will want to eat.

If you only heat up the milk to 110 degrees, and add your culture and let it sit, you will end up with a ropy, mucousal, slimy and icky mess of a dairy product that if you have hogs around, they will thank you for, but I guarantee, you will NOT want to eat. It’s nasty. It’s icky. It’s gross. Don’t go there, because I’ve already gone there for you.

Do not waste your milk.

That’s the first caveat.

The second is simple–make sure all of your tools and utensils and hands are perfectly clean before starting. If you are really OCD about it you can sterilize everything with boiling water–but don’t submerge your entire thermometer–just the probe–otherwise you break it. But you don’t have to be completely nutty about it. Just make sure stuff’s clean and well rinsed–detergent in your culturing vessel will make your yogurt not work right–and it will make it all taste funny.

The third is this–if you want, you can add powdered milk to your milk to boost the protein content and to make a thicker product. I personally have had good results without taking this step. But I will note where you can add it if you want, (After the milk has been heated and then cooled down to culturing temperature) and I’ll give you an amount if you want to use it. (About a half cup per quart of milk.) You can get organic dry powdered milk from Organic Valley.

Okay, now I think we’re ready to get us some culture!

Strained Greek-Style Yogurt
Ingredients:

2 quarts of whole milk (Or, a mixture of whole and two percent milk, or a mixture of whole milk and cream, etc. If you add cream, do it in this ratio: 7 cups milk and 1 of heavy cream)
1/3 cup of commercially available yogurt or “mother” culture made by following the instructions from the company that makes the culture
1 cup nonfat dry milk

Method:

I bet you never thought you’d read a recipe from me that had two or three ingredients, but here we are. I’m just full of surprises.

Set out your yogurt or mother culture to warm up to room temperature about an hour before you make yogurt. If it’s too cold, it will cool off your warm milk too much when you add it. You do not want this to happen.

Get out your big pot that holds at least four quarts, and your thermometer, wooden spoon, ladle, whisk and big measuring cup. Make sure everything is really clean and wash your hands really well. If your hair sheds, this is a good time to wrap it in a do rag, pop it under a hat or shave your head.

Pour your milk into the pot and put the pot on medium heat and start stirring. Get used to it: you’re going to stir a lot for a while. Don’t worry, it’s good for you. Builds character and forearm muscles.

Take out your thermometer and check the temperature with one hand while you stir with the other.

When it gets to 160 degrees, turn your heat down and keep stirring. At this point, you can keep it at 160 degrees for five minutes or you can slowly let it heat up to 180 degrees. I generally stop at about 170. I keep it at my high temperature for five minutes and then remove it from the heat. I set the pot on my counter, but you can also fill your sink with ice water and set the pot in there. That will help you cool the milk faster.

Cooling the milk is easy, but it can take a while. If you use a sink full of ice water, it will go faster, but just using your ladle to stir, scoop and let the milk pour back into the pot from a height of about seven to eight inches will cool the milk by about five degrees per eight minutes or so of work. It cools faster at first, but the last five degrees seem to take forever. Whatever, you need it to get to 110 degrees. Do not let it cool down past 90 degrees. 110 is what you are shooting for.

Scoop about a cup of milk and put it into the big measuring cup. Now is when you add the nonfat dry milk if you are going to use it. Whisk it into the milk in the measuring cup and do not stop until it is completely combined. If there are lumps in this milk, there will be lumps in your yogurt.

Whisk in your yogurt or starter.

Check your temperature. If it is below 110 degrees F, especially if it’s below 90 degrees F, you need to pop it onto the stove, and heat it up until it comes to 110 degrees and NO hotter. So put it on low heat, stir the whole time and keep that thermometer in the milk and when it gets to 108 degrees, take it right off the heat and turn off the stove. It will go up the next two degrees on its own.

Pour the yogurt into your culturing container, close it up and do whatever it is you are going to do to keep it warm. In the case of my Yogotherm, I just pour it into the plastic inner chamber, close the inner lid and then close the outer lid and leave it in a warmish, quiet place.

Now, leave it alone for eight to twelve hours. I get it ready before I go to bed and then check it in the morning.

After it’s been between eight to twelve hours, open up your container and see what has happened. What you should see is a thickened mass that is still somewhat fluid, but mostly solid. The cream will have floated to the top, and underneath it should be thickish yogurt.

Put it in your fridge and let it cool off and firm up for another five hours at least. I often leave it for eight hours. It thickens a good bit on its own while it cools down slowly.

Okay, if you just want regular yogurt, it’s done and ready to eat.

If you want Greek style strained yogurt, now is the time to get out your straining bag or pillowcase.

Pour your yogurt into the bag, twist the top and tie it with a string. Hang the bag from a shelf, a cabinet nob, a hanging pot rack or whatever other sturdy thing you can find to hang it from, with a bowl underneath to catch the whey. Put it someplace cool, where no cats, children or other flies can get to it. I hang it from a shelf in my utility room which I keep closed.

Leave it for two to three hours and when it’s done, scrape it into a storage jar, and whisk it lightly to distribute the cream.

The whey you can keep to put in soups, cook vegetables in, or to use as the liquid in bread baking. You can also use it as a starter for kimchi or sauerkraut. Or, if you have cats, you can give it to them, or you can make ricotta cheese with it, or you can feed it to your dog or hogs if you have them.

When all of this is done, you will have thick, creamy natural Greek yogurt at a fraction of what Fage costs in the store.

We’ve gotten to where we like the flavor and texture of the homemade yogurt much more than the commercial. It’s the quality of the milk and the different cultures I used in it, as well as the amount of cream I use in it that I think makes the difference.

Eat your yogurt however you like or use it in cooking. You just need to leave 1/3 cup of yogurt for culturing your next two quarts of milk which you should make within 7 days. After that, your cultures may die. I make my yogurt on Sundays.

And my best friend (and partner in film making crime) Dan said I should make a blog post of it, so that all of my loyal readers can discover that even The Culinary Nerd has her off day in the kitchen. That way they can take heart when all goes awry in their kitchens and know that they are not alone, for lo, The Culinary Nerd is with thee.

And with thee, I most certainly am today.

It didn’t actually start in the kitchen.

It started in the adjacent utility room. I went to do some laundry, so I put a load in the washer, then went to clear the load out of the dryer from yesterday and discovered something.

Something bad.

Something really bad.

A ballpoint pen had been washed and dried. And had thus leaked its ink all over the load of laundry and worse, the drum of the dryer.

Luckily, no clothes were harmed in this debacle. The load had been the bathroom rug which had been helpfully watered by a visiting two year old who didn’t quite make it to the potty, along with all of my farmer’s market bags, dishtowels and cleaning rags. The pen likely was in one of the bags, but it could have been dropped in the pile of cleaning clothes by accident.

However, while none of the clothes were touched by ink, two dishtowels I had embroidered by hand WERE marked hideously by splotches and splortches of blue-black ink.

I was strong.

I neither cried nor threw anything.

I just ran to the internet to find out what would remove ink from a dryer drum.

Hairspray said one site. Goo Gone or Oops! said another. (These are commercial solvents that do great work on crayons, sticker gunk and bubble gum.) Nail polish remover.

Then a fourth site said “Rubbing alcohol.”

I was suddenly reminded of my senior year of high school, when my then boyfriend had taken up a Sharpie marker and had written, “Aardvarks Have More Fun” in large letters across a classroom wall. And then admitted it to our journalism teacher. While she marched off to get the principal, he and I skedaddled to the chemistry lab where we beseeched our favorite teacher for a solvent to solve our wee dilemma.

He handed us a gallon-sized container of industrial grade isopropyl alcohol and sent us on our way with the admonition that unlike water which is just called “the universal solvent,” isopropyl alcohol really did dissolve just about anything you’d use to put a mark on a wall.

Which it did. My boyfriend wiped it off the newly painted eye-bleeding yellow wall, while under the eyes of ten fellow students and then handed me the jug and sent me off to return it to the lab.

By the time she got there with the vice principal, there wasn’t even any fumes left to tell the tale.

And all of the students smilingly denied knowing anything about any aardvarks having anything looking like fun in that general vicinity. Since there was no proof of vandalism, no one got in trouble, though I suspect that incident, along with a few others, probably drove the poor journalism teacher to drink.

So, with aardvarks and graffiti dancing in my head, I went to get my rubbing alcohol, and found that there was barely a tablespoon left in the entire house.

So, I went out to buy several bottles of it and returned. (Mind you, it’s nearly time to pick up Kat from art camp, and the laundry is still not done.)

So, pour, pour, wipe, wipe, scrub, scrub, cough, sputter, cough, swoon, sneeze, swoon, gasp.

Yeah, I discovered that even with the household strength alcohol you can get at the drugstore, you really shouldn’t stick your head in the drum of a dryer while you try and clean it. The fumes are….um….heady. And unpleasant.

On the other hand, how the hell you are supposed to see what you are doing while cleaning ink out of the dryer drum with alcohol without sticking your head in and feeling a bit fumy is more than I can tell you.

So, I’d clean for a while, start gasping and coughing and then would take a rest and breathe fresh air from the open windows.

After an hour of scrubbing, and a break to go pick Kat up in a torrential rainstorm, I managed to get it clean. Then, I had to let it air out, lest I stick laundry in it, turn it on and the alcohol fumes ignite with the gas flame that warms the dryer.

So, I figured while I was waiting for the airing out process to do it’s job, I’d go into the kitchen and see how my newly fermented yogurt was doing while it was straining.

Yes, I’ve taking up culturing my own dairy products. And yes, there will be more posts. In fact, I had planned today to write a post about making yogurt, but well, things got in the way.

Like ink stains in the dryer and on my towels. (Though the alcohol also took most of the ink out of the towels as well. Which is good, because I worked really hard on the embroidery.)

Anyway, I cut down the yogurt and promptly splashed whey on the counter and when I squeezed the cheesecloth wrapped yogurt lightly, discovered that the cheesecloth I was using was not finely woven enough to let the liquid out without letting out too much of the yogurt solids. Even with four layers of it employed, I ended up with yogurt squirted up one arm and down my chest.

So, yeah.

Another mess to clean up. Which I did, but I was mighty grumpy to have lost so much yogurt.

However, after licking it off my hand, (waste not, want not–besides my hand had been scrupulously washed in hot water and soap before touching the wayward dairy product) I discovered that the taste was better than the last batch, so I was getting somewhere in making my own personal blend of cultures in my quest for Greek yogurt that is even better than the creamy and dense commercially available Fage.

So, I scraped the yogurt out of the useless four layers of cheesecloth into a glass storage jar, which ended with lots of cursing and attempts to pry the sticky zillion yards of cloth off my person.

And then I did some more laundry, which did not result in the house catching fire, so I must have done that right.

While that was going, I decided to start preparing to make dinner. It WAS going to be ma po tofu with dry fried string beans and steamed jasmine rice.

I always make the rice first, so I measured out two cups of rice, rinsed it and popped open the rice cooker, ready to pour the rice in, and gagged when I was confronted by a swarm of fruit flies, and the stomach churning odor of rotted rice.

The last time the rice cooker had been used was two weeks ago when I was in Reno, Nevada, at a family meeting. Morganna had made Thai food for Zak and Kat while I was gone and no one had cleaned out the rice cooker.

I scrubbed it clean, swooned, gagged and scrubbed it some more and declared that I was not about to eat rice tonight, and called Zak to tell him my adventures.

He agreed we’d go out to eat and I thought nothing of it.

I cleaned the kitchen, finished the laundry and thought it was all over.

However, I was wrong.

The pork I had thawed out for the ma po tofu had leaked pink raw pork juice all over the microwave.

It dripped out and down, onto the toaster, the counter top and…the bowl of heirloom tomatoes from my garden below.

The tomatoes nearly made me cry.

I tossed them in the compost bucket to feed my worms, then scrubbed everything on that side of the kitchen clean again, putting the turntable from the microwave into the dishwasher and cleansing every nook and cranny of the toaster inside and outside.

I put the pork back in the fridge after double-bagging and resealing it, and after Zak came home, we went out for dinner.

I even ate a piece of cheesecake for dessert–which is something I NEVER do, especially when I am not sure what the hell went into the making of said cheesecake.

But it tasted pretty good, and I didn’t have to make it myself.

Because lord knows what would have happened if I’d turned my hand to cheesecake today.

The water bath probably would have exploded or something.

That all said–I want to let all of you know–shit happens. It happens in quantities large and small, sprinkled throughout a week, or like I had, all in one day.

And when it does, the best thing to do, is shake your head, laugh, clean up the mess and then have some cheesecake.

Because even bad cheesecake makes a bad day better.

I credit the intense emotional connection to the excellent soundtrack provided by Zak, the very talented musician who also happens to be my husband. His fingerpicked acoustic guitar song, “So Pretty” and slide resonator guitar version of “Simple Gifts”, as well as a short electric guitar bit called, “Big Ag Blues” were all stupendous, but everyone’s favorite seemed to be a song called “Circle of Life.”

“Circle of Life” is a round, and was written decades ago by one of our oldest friends, Sonja Coble. It was originally sung a capella, but Zak worked out an arrangement with multiple acoustic and electric guitars playing all of the vocal pieces, building the music to a lovely emotional crescendo.

The music combined with the powerful words of our interviewees– farmers, food producers, non-profit directors and businesspeople– and the beautiful footage shot and edited by Dan, into a heady brew which moved our audience in ways I don’t think any of us involved in the project expected.

I’m thrilled now to finish up our interviews–we have about six of them left to do, and start writing a script so we can start the hard work of editing, composing and recording music and doing all of the other post-production stuff that makes a film magical. Having seen the effect it has on other people has energized all of us, propelling us forward toward our goal of seeing this project through to the finish.

So, let me publicly thank the folks working on the film with me: Daniel Trout, Heather Irwin and Zak Kramer, as well as all of the amazingly generous people of Athens who have cheerfully opened their farms, homes, businesses and lives to our cameras and microphones so we can capture their stories.

Together, all of us are making something that I hope can carry the story of how a thriving, continually expanding local food economy evolved in Athens to other communities so that the model can be made anew in other small towns and cities across our country.

We have a great harvest here in our small corner of Appalachian Ohio–now it’s time to plant some seeds elsewhere and watch them grow.

As we all know around here, I love beans. (They are the magical fruit, right?)

When I met Zak, he told me he didn’t like beans. I was like, “What?” But then, I quickly understood–he had never had them except out of a can, and if there is something that might well make someone dislike beans, it’s those mushy, flavorless critters that come out of cans masquerading as beans. It doesn’t matter what kind of bean they say they are, or what color they are, most of them taste the same–blah. Kinda mealy, kinda mushy, very yucky.

So, I proceeded to cook him a pot of proper pinto beans, made the old hillbilly way with a ham hock (I can feel the vegetarians wincing, but well, beans taste mighty good that way and I wanted to make sure to hook him before I went all vegetarian on him) a bay leaf, an onion and a garlic clove and lots of water which turns into a delicious bean broth that was always my favorite part of beans when I was a kid. Mother thought I was weird, but I liked to drink a cup of it right out of the pot, I liked it so well. (I did the same with the liquid kale is simmered in, too–she told my doctor about it and he said, “Let her do it! That’s where most of the vitamins have escaped to!)

Well, needless to say, Zak was converted, and we’ve had lots of beans in our pantry ever since.

Recently, I’ve been keeping Athens very own Shagbark Seed & Mill Company’s black turtle beans in my pantry and have been using them for all sorts of purposes–as a plain old pot of beans, drained and used to top nachos, in salsas, in tacos and in enchiladas. And they are mighty good, no, not just good, but delicious, with a nice chew to the skins with creamy, sweet interiors. And they make fine broth.

And I’ve heard tell that Michelle and Brandon are offering pinto beans this fall after they get harvested–glory hallelujah, and praise be! I’m waiting impatiently to taste those, because when I was growing up, pinto beans and cornbread were a big favorite, especially in the late fall or winter. I never tired of them, even when we ate them a whole lot when Dad was laid off for a year and we went from “somewhat impoverished” to “downright poor.” Even eating them several times a week didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for them. Pintos are just that good, and I cannot wait to taste ones fresh from the field, because I know they’ll be better than the ones from the store which could have been hanging around for who knows how long.

BUT, you know, a reader named Laughingrat commented when I wrote about Shagbark’s black beans and clued me into a company that grows and sells heirloom varieties of dried beans out in California, called Rancho Gordo.

And you know how I am. I looked at their website, and saw all the beautiful beans in all their glorious colors: yellow, red, purple, black, piebald black and white or brown and white, streaked, spotted and speckled, pink, and celedon green–and of course, I was smitten. I’m a sucker for colors, and even though I knew darned good and well that when you cook dried beans most of those luscious pigments melt away and you end up with beans in some shade of creamy beige or brown, I couldn’t help it–I had to know if these beans were indeed any more special than the ones that came from the grocery store.

Steve Sando, the owner of Rancho Gordo and the Guru of Legumes, writes eloquent descriptions of the flavors and textures of the different legumes he offers in his online catalog and at his retail outlet in Napa, as well as in San Francisco, and his words haunted me. Because, I just had to know if his beans were just as good as the beans grown here in Athens.

So, I ordered a couple of pound packages for myself and a full dozen packages as a Father’s Day gift for Zak’s dad, Karl. (Karl is a bean aficionado, just like me.)

And, I finally got around to testing out three of the varieties from Rancho Gordo: “Pebbles,” which is a fascinating bean in that from the same plant come beans of all different shades of brown, pinkish beige, black and yellow, “Yellow Indian Woman,” which is widely grown among the Native American tribes in the northern plains (though it was originally brought to Montana by a Swedish family) and “Eye of the Goat,” which looks like a very fat, rounded, glossy pinto bean.

And here’s what I found out–Sando’s beans from Rancho Gordo have the same qualities of freshness that I found in Shagbark’s beans. They cook slightly faster than grocery store dried beans, probably because they’ve not been sitting in a warehouse for years on end. They also have more flavor–a LOT more flavor–and each type has a different character. And, finally–their textures are more varied than most grocery store beans–each type of bean has a distinctive texture–just as the black beans from Shagbark had tougher skins, but very creamy interiors, which led to them being paradoxically both slightly chewy and yet melting in the mouth.

I cooked all three types the same–in a pot with a bay leaf, a small amount of smoked pork (a small hunk of ham hock), a small whole onion and a whole clove of garlic. Then, I used each one in several ways to see how versatile they were in the context of different recipes.

The first one I cooked was “Pebbles.” You know I had to see what they were like, because they really do look like a bunch of river-polished stones. If you drilled holes in these beans and strung them up, they’d look like a necklace of agate beads–they really are that pretty, as you can see from the photo. (Maybe I should attempt to string some of them into a bracelet, if not a necklace.)

I used the cooked, drained beans to top nachos made with Shagbark’s amazing corn tortilla chips and some really lovely aged cheddar, and Kat and Zak and I loved them. Kat proclaimed them the “bestest bean nachos ever,” and Zak said that the beans had a slightly sweet flavor that was interesting.

Also, I noticed that while the differences between the colors of the cooked beans was not as startling as with the raw beans, they still showed subtle variations that made them look pretty neat on the plate.

I also ended up using these in a taco filling and as the filling to some vegetarian enchiladas that included grilled corn cut from the cobs and summer squash, and even in those contexts, the beans retained their sweet flavor and textural character.

The next beans I cooked were the “Yellow Indian Woman” beans, but I neglected to take photographs of them, either before or after they were cooked. They start out as ovoid brownish yellow beans and cook up to a pale pinkish brown. Their skins are somewhat tough so they retain their shape very well, even when cooked in a pressure cooker. Their flavor is distinctly earthy and sweet, and when I made them into refried beans, they had a silky, creamy texture that Kat and I adored.

Zak liked them, too, but he prefers the beans I cooked today to use in a refried bean dip to go with my salsa for a potluck at Kat’s preschool.

These beauties are known as “Ojo de Cabra,” or, “Eye of the Goat,” and at first glance they don’t look all that special. I mean, yeah, they’re pretty, but really they look like really pinto beans that went on an eating binge and are about to burst their skins, they’ve gained so much weight from all their gobbling.

But they don’t taste like pintos. They have a very fresh, sweet flavor with a hint of mushroomy depth. Steve Sando says likes to cook them simply and then serve them with some grated raw onion and a squeeze of lime juice and a bit of salt. You can see my version pictured in the blue bowl near the top of this post–I diced the onions finely instead of grating them, added minced cilantro along with the salt and a sprinkle of Aleppo pepper flakes just before the lime juice squeeze.

And you know what–that makes a fine bowl of beans. And it showcases the very meaty texture of the Goat Beans as I’ve come to call them. That’s what I ate for lunch today.

But for the potluck tonight, I mashed the beans and fried them with fresh onion and garlic in a bit of bacon fat melted with olive oil, and Zak said he absolutely loved the fuller, deeper texture of these beans to the creaminess of the “Yellow Indian Woman” beans. He said that the texture was firmer and a bit drier, but it made the beans taste somehow nutty in addition to just plain good.

So now we have a new favorite refried bean bean.

That is, until Shagbark’s pintos come in.

Then, we’ll see whose beans come out on top.

Until then, let it be known that I highly approve of the heirloom beans Sando is offering through Rancho Gordo–and while I’m at it–his two books, The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Grower’s Guide: Steve Sando’s 50 Favorite Varieties and Heirloom Beans: Great Recipes for Dips and Spreads, Soups and Stews, Salads and Salsas, and Much More from Rancho Gordo are downright awesome, too.

Both are filled, cover to cover, with bean lore, cultivation information, recipes, and description of the individual characteristics and flavors of a whole array of heirloom beans, and are equally filled to the brim with Sando’s very infectious leguminous enthusiasm. Both books are well worth checking out, though the second book is more a cookbook that is geared toward foodies, while the first has essential bean cultivation information, as well as descriptions of the beans, their histories and a few recipes featuring them that aren’t included in the first second book.

So there we are–check out Rancho Gordo and see what you think of their heirloom beans–because they really are just that good.

Now, I’m going to stop writing and wait impatiently for Shagbark’s pinto beans to be ready to harvest…..