As you might have guessed from previous posts, I am a fanatic about heirloom legumes and was fairly proud of finding some of the best here in the USA and in Europe to sell online. Several weeks ago The Most Famous Bean in Spain, by Maggie Schmitt, on the Atlantic Food Channel hit my google reader, and after reading alubia de Tolosa in the short excerpt, I assumed that the article was about the Spanish Tolosana bean, the tasty cinnamon and burgundy colored heirloom beans that I used to sell. When I clicked on the link and saw the article it hit me like a ton of bricks. This holiest of holies from the Basque country was actually a small, purplish-black bean with a white dot that I had never heard of or seen before - just when you think you’ve got the whole world…
These beans are gorgeous, but it's difficult to tell from this image borrowed from Slow Foods - the image in Ms. Schmitt’s piece is much more telling than. The beans have not only achieved D.O status in Spain but also inclusion in the Slow Food Ark of Taste. After reading background information on the Slow Food website and the Babarruna Tolosako Elkartea (BTE - Tolosa Bean Growers Association), I began salivating. (Slow Foods gets a little carried away, attributing ‘indigenous’ status and cultivation in the Basque Country to this New World food six centuries prior to Columbus arriving here! The BTE mentions this possibility but recognizes the likelihood of its first cultivation in the 16th Century.) Searching for a source here in the USA, I first ran across a mention of the bean in a piece by none other than Anthony Boutard at Ayers Creek Farm. I actually asked Anthony about these beans the last time I visited their booth, and he told me that he discontinued growing them because of their propensity to cross-pollinate - like other members of the black turtle bean family - with any and all other beans. In that same search, I arrived at the Spanish specialty food purveyor La Tienda, and the reason for this post.
La Tienda offers “Alubia Tolosana Beans” in a one-kilo bag for $9.95 with a description:
They are a distinct reddish purple color with white spots. These beans are very similar to the classic black bean D.O. Alubia de Tolosa, but are a fraction of the price.
The image provided shows that they are clearly the cinnamon and purple mottled Spanish Tolosana beans, aka Prince beans, that I used to sell, and while they are very good in their own right, they are not Albuia de Tolosa, and they do not taste like black beans. They also offer a 5 kilo bag of “Alubias Tolosanas” for $98.50 from El Maragato in Spain, and while these are clearly black beans, the fact that they are not labeled “D.O. Alubia de Tolosa” suggests they are not the same beans…despite the high price - El Maragato grows its beans hundreds of miles to the west of the official Tolosa D. O. growing area. Needless to say I am still searching for a source.
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