BEAN YEAR

There is tamarind candy available in the sweet bean box now. The carob and mesquite has had a strong response from people, I still have some if anyone is interested in more just let me know.

If you’re in Mastodon, Louisa from No Substitutions, Please recently made some carob cookies. And here is David Lebovitz mesquite cookies:

https://www.davidlebovitz.com/a-chocolate-chi/

Bean letter 4 begins now:

CAROB Ceratonia siliqua

It is a travesty that Carob has been relegated to being a “chocolate substitute”. 

While I was packing the roasted carob for these boxes my partner said 

“that’s a strange smell, like, like … roasted berries? I asked, “Is it bad?”, she said, “No, it’s good, it’s just very different, I’m not sure I’ve smelled anything like that before.” 

I have a minor hobby of keeping track of people who eat mono-diets. That is, people who claim to only eat 1 food for an extended period. For example, Scott (a grand old man a real mensch) and Helen Nearing would only eat Apples for weeks at a time. There’s a modern research diet of eating only potatoes. And famously monks and ascetics from many traditions had mono-diets. The most important one of note here is St John, who spent his time in the desert eating “locust and honey”. For a long long time the locust was thought to actually refer the pods of the Carob tree, many bean family trees have locust in their name to this day, and the honey was thought to reference … honey. This was believed true for many hundreds of years, to the extent that Carob is often called as a common name: St Johns Bread. However, recently this has been challenged and it’s believed now that locust referred to … well … locusts bugs and, unbelievably, the honey is now actually believed to be the sap exudate from a regional Tamarix shrub. I heard a phrase once, I think on Time Team, about the Victorian obsession with King Arthur or “Druids”: “We know more now about the distant past than people at any other point in the past knew about it.” 

I can’t wrap up Carob without mentioning Locust Bean Gum, gums (very interesting hydrocolloids starches) derived from beans like Carob, guar, and acacia are used to improve food texture and shelf life and have been safely used for thousands of years. More beans in our food!

MESQUITE, Prosopis syn Neltuma sp – I think alba

Something has gone wrong that mesquite is not a greater part of the US diet. 

I am prone to rambling rants, obviously. But something that helps me focus is beginning to do something to improve a situation, and letting the contours of that decision lead the way. I can get too wrapped up in thinking that sometimes the best action is to simply start. To let something actually happening in the world lead and define what happens next. This entire bean project is very much doing something and hoping that in that process we also figure something out. 

For example: how much does my speculation about why we don’t eat mesquite matter? My lamentations about the US food system are frankly irrelevant. Instead, what I can *do* is send you some mesquite. 

What you’ve got here is from South America. There is not, that I have found, any significant commercial processing of mesquiteNorth America. There are hobbyist who do it like so many people press their own apple cider in the fall, or can their own strawberry jam in the early summer, but I haven’t found a bigsource here that can supply us. 
Like with many of the odd beans we’re learning about, the first step is getting you to try them. Getting your friends to try them. So that I can one day approach one of the more serious hobbyist, and get them to pick and mill us some mesquite flour. 

Much like Carob, Mesquite is a desert bean tree. One reason this is so important is that these trees are Keystone Species, theysearch wide for water, bring it up, and let it go at night, misting down on the shaded ground under them. They provide shelter and habitat for a wide range of desert plants and animals. Over a long enough time period, they stabilize the ecosystems of deserts, building up living webs of life where otherwise very little could live. 

Like carob, one frustration of mesquite flour is that we don’t have a culture of how to use them. The simplest answer is to augment other flour in baking. For example, replacing up to ¼ of the flour in a baking-soda based bread, like pancakes or like banana bread seems ok in my experience and the flavor is fantastic. Similarly, adding some to a smoothie or adding some to pasta flour like some people do with chestnut flour is straightforward. I am eagerly searching for more recipes and if you’ve got one or a family or traditional use, I am all ears. 

TAMARAND Tamarindus indica

Another bean tree that must be mentioned is the tropical Tamarind. If you’re unsure of how to process other bean tree pods you might find and harvest, you can get some whole tamarind from the grocery store to practice with. I am mentioning Tamarind also to highlight that there is commercial bean tree harvesting all over the world, we aren’t re-inventing the wheel if we were to support and build up our own mesquite or honey locust harvests and processing.