As soon as the weather presented a semblance of winter, we headed straight for the Rancho Gordo stall at the Saturday Ferry Plaza Market, where Steve Sando sells his excellent dried beans, explaining the varieties in fast-paced speech while he tosses in recipe ideas and anecdotes.
Sando's passion for his product is obvious when you see the vast array of different beans he carries. "I get obsessive about things," he confesses, "And I really, really love beans." That love took off when he began exploring New World foods after a stint selling tomatoes. He realized that the universe of beans was much larger than he originally knew, and he started growing and selling them out of his warehouse and at farmer's markets. He hunted down heirloom breeds in his travels to Mexico, and brought them to California, where growers in the Delta plant and harvest the rare legumes for him. ("I'm not really a good grower," he confides).
