Magic beans help Houstonians get through the pandemic
“I thought beans were just beans,” says Sharpstown resident Jane Hudson of her view on the legumes before she saw the light. For four years now, she has been a member of the Rancho Gordo Bean Club.
Yes, a bean club. Rancho Gordo, an heirloom bean purveyor based in Napa, Calif., is somewhat of a cult in the food world. Steve Sando founded the company almost 20 years ago. He visits Mexico a couple times a year to find heirloom and rare varieties of beans, as well as farmers who are willing to grow them for him.
Two decades later, it’s a robust operation that ships bags of beans to customers across the country and to dozens of retail locations. Bright purple ayocote morado beans. Red-flecked white cranberry beans. Yellow eye beans that look like a whiteand-yellow version of black-eyed peas. Anyone who has eaten these beans will tell you they are not even comparable to the cans you buy from the grocery store.
And those in the know will also tell you the pinnacle of bean geekery is being a member of
the Rancho Gordo Bean Club. Members receive special shipments four times a year that include six types of rare beans and one other product, accompanied by recipes and occasional swag.
Membership costs $40 — and you can’t have one. The demand became so great Sando had to close the rolls a few years ago. New spots open up exceedingly rarely, typically when there is turnover. There are currently 8,500 members — including 304 in Texas and 112 in Greater Houston — and 14,000 people on the waitlist.
Hudson’s beans have served her very well during the pandemic. In fact, when the outbreak started, she ordered 5 pounds of beans on top of her incoming Bean Club shipment. She says she never really left the house much anyway, so she felt wellprepared for quarantine.
Hudson ran a popular Houston food blog, B4 U Eat, for 23 years. She retired six years ago from her day job but wanted to keep active. She spotted a sunny patch in her backyard, dug it up and created an edible garden. Much of what she eats, she grows herself. She makes her own pasta, her own yogurt, and even her own mozzarella.
Last year, she bought an Instant Pot — initially to make yogurt, as she eats a cup every morning — and realized it was a fantastic tool for cooking beans. Hudson has her bean routine down: She cooks a big batch in the pot then vacuum seals individual portions in small plastic bags so they keep longer in the fridge. She’ll use the beans as the core for a meal and switch up the side dishes. She makes bean stews of different kinds, which can be as simple as beans with onion and celery, or flavored with a ham hock. She sometimes makes a twist on jambalaya with beans and andouille.
“Beans are very versatile,” Hudson says. “You can make them Italian, Asian, Mexican …”
Bean Club member MM Pack, a private chef and food writer based in La Porte, says beans are like a blank canvas a cook can build flavors on. She typically simmers the beans in a clay pot and adds onions, garlic and aromatics, such as bay leaves, thyme, oregano and cumin. Sometimes she adds diced carrots for a little sweetness. Sometimes she chops up some greens and adds those to the mix. She also loves pasta and beans together with a little sausage. And she always has leftovers, with which she makes refried beans; she has yet to find a variety it doesn’t work with.
Pack’s client, who she cooks for, lives in San Francisco. Before the pandemic, she flew back and forth every month. It was during her trips to the Bay Area when she discovered Rancho Gordo beans and got in the habit of bringing several bags home. She became a Bean Club member in late 2019.
She says there aren’t great takeout options in La Porte, so she’s been doing a lot of home cooking the past few months, and the beans have certainly come in handy.
“I’m never letting it go now,” Pack says of the membership.
In The Woodlands, Bean Club member Helene Gallaway was comforted by having a good supply of beans at the beginning of the pandemic.
“I didn’t worry when the grocery stores were out of beans, because I knew that I had my stock in the pantry,” she says.
Gallaway’s life-long love of beans came from her Southern father, who often told the family “when times were lean, beans and cornbread kept body and soul together,” she says. The bean’s nutritional power stuck with her. She is now a flexitarian and was a vegetarian for long periods of her life, so she’s always relied on beans as a protein source.
She’s continued her steady bean diet in quarantine and has even discovered new dishes. One includes large white beans, like royal coronas, simmered in a tomatobased sauce with cinnamon, cayenne and paprika, then topped with breadcrumbs and baked feta. It’s become a family favorite. She also incorporates produce from her CSA farm share into beanbased meals.
Gallaway has been in the Rancho Gordo Bean Club since January 2018 and loves the story of the company as much as its product.
“With every spoonful, you think about the love and the labor and the history and the heritage that went into growing that bean,” she says.
She also loves the community, which lived online even before the pandemic, notably in a private Facebook group called “Rancho Gordo Bean Club Members.” Gallaway says many people have expressed how important the beans have been to them throughout quarantine. There’s always excitement in the group when a Bean Club shipment is on its way, but there is an unwritten rule: Don’t spill the beans. The contents are a surprise and no spoilers are allowed. (There is a separate Facebook group called “Rancho Gordo Bean Club Members Spoilers” for this purpose.)
Steve Sando is very active on social media and often engages with customers and club members with it, as well as through his newsletter and blog.
As it turns out, Houston has a special place in his heart. Revival Market, the Agricole Hospitality butcher and gourmet food shop in the Heights, was one of Rancho Gordo’s very first wholesale accounts.
“If I remember correctly, I had to beg Steve to wholesale to us,” says Agricole co-owner Morgan Weber.
At that point, Rancho
Gordo was only selling to a handful of local restaurants in the Bay Area. When Weber was opening Revival Market in 2010, he wanted to stock unique grocery items that people couldn’t just get at any Whole Foods or other chain. Rancho Gordo beans were a perfect fit.
Sando agreed to sell to the Revival team and he noticed they were buying really smart, asking for the obscure varieties and not just the standard beans like pinto. Two years later, the idea for a bean dinner at Revival came about, and Sando flew down to be the honored guest.
Both Weber and Sando confirmed the dinner took place on June 17, 2012, but neither could find the menu in their archives. Houston food writer Phaedra Cook, who attended the dinner, chronicled it for My Table. Dishes reportedly included bruschetta with olive oilpoached Gulf blackfin tuna and mayocaba beans, marinated cranberry beans with seasonal vegetables and Gulf shrimp, and red bean ice cream.
Weber remembered it was seven to eight courses long and very creatively approached; he also recalled Sando’s “welcoming and gregarious” personality. Sando has fond memories from that night as well.
“You see your children go out in the world and you hope they go to a nice home,” he says, still talking about his beans. “But to have someone so clever create dishes that you would have never dreamed of is really a kick.”
Sando says he enjoyed meeting Texans who had been keenly following his bean adventures for years. He also loved visiting Texas — and Houston in particular. Given his Bay Area base, Sando was told he would like Austin, but he was actually surprised by how much he loved Houston. A self-described “Mexican food snob,” he raves about the city’s food scene and evokes a very special meal at Hugo’s in Montrose.
“I was totally enamored with the town,” he says.
The Revival event was one of the first dinners Sando did in collaboration with a restaurant or store; he went on to do several more over the years.
Rancho Gordo was already wildly popular pre-coronavirus. Every year, the business grows 15 to 20 percent. Right now, sales are up 180 percent over last year. Sando understands why his beans have been a hit during the pandemic.
“Everything feels out of control,” he says. “When you’re stuck at home and you can turn a hard rock into something creamy and delicious, that feels like control.”