table talk / By Bob Doran

Does Paul Giuntoli grow the best beans in the state?

(Nov. 15, 2007)  The subject line for the e-mail said simply, “Cool Beans!” The message came from juice man Dave Feral (see “Table Talk,” Oct. 4), who serves on the board for North Coast Grower’s Association, the folks who run the local farmers’ markets. Dave noted that he’d heard at a recent NCGA meeting that, “Paul Giuntoli of Warren Creek Farms has some of the best beans in the state,” at least according to bean researcher Steve Temple from UC Davis.

Now, I’ve been looking at Paul’s beans for some time. He displays them in boxes alongside his potatoes and other produce, and the beans certainly look cool — black ones, red ones, pale yellow ones and in particular the variegated black and white, or gold and white, or speckled red varieties. But I don’t know enough about beans to tell which ones are the best, so I found Steve Temple’s number, and left him a message before I headed to the newspaper office on unrelated business.

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There I found Journal publisher Judy Hodgson finishing up her lunch, some sort of variation on cassoulet, a white bean dish. Without my remarking on her meal in any way, she announced that she’d found the best beans around, canario beans (akin to the Italian cannellini bean), from Warren Creek Farms.

Interesting.

Temple called later that day from the 24-acre UC Davis Bean Research Farm, where he was taking a break from the bean harvest. “We had bad rains and cold, wet weather for a couple of weeks and now we’re trying desperately to get stuff out of the field,” he explained.

You could call Temple a bean expert. He’s been working with them for 33 years: 11 years at an international research center in South America, the rest at Davis, the “aggie” campus for the UC system, where his program is part of the UC Cooperative Extension.

What he’s been doing is hybridizing heirloom bean strains, which, he emphasized, does not mean artificial genetic modification. “These are conventional breeding crosses, and then I work with the segregated populations to make selections, test them for diseases and insect resistance, things like that,” he said. “From there we look at yield and cooking quality.”

The bean strains Temple has been working on are deemed heirlooms since they are directly connected to the original beans bred by those who lived on this continent and in South America thousands of years ago. “They’re improved in that they’re now resistant to viruses, which makes them much better for organic, reduced input,” Temple explained. “Small farmers, those who don’t want to use pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers on their crop — they’re friendlier for those growers, and for consumers who don’t want beans grown with those kinds of things. Bottom line is they go back to very old parentage, but they’re recent hybrids crossed with modern cultivars.”

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