Imported French Tarbais Beans (Label Rouge) - Dried
1.1 pounds - Tarbais, France
One of the special qualities of the Tarbais bean is that they don't fall apart when reheated, all the whilst maintaining that melt-in-your-mouth texture. This also makes the Tarbais perfect for bean salads, and any soup or casserole that calls for white beans.
The cost of production is high, and the supply is limited every year.
With their balanced flavor, a thin skin, and a sweet, almost buttery flesh that is truly delicious.
Traditional recipes include garbure and cassoulet, and it pairs nicely with fish (seafood cassoulet with cod or tuna), for instance.
The history of French Tarbais Beans
In the early 1700s, the bishop of Tarbes - a town located in the foothills of the French Pyrénées - had the chance to witness the cultivation of crops from the New World while on an extended stay in Spain. He was quite taken with maize and the many varieties of kidney beans.
Upon his return from Spain in 1712, he decided to introduce this bean in the Adour valley: the beautiful river originates in the Pyrénées, flows through Tarbes and ends its run in the Atlantic ocean near Bayonne.
The local farmers adopted the tasty crops with much enthusiasm in the plain of Tarbes. The bean that became most popular looked like a cross between a lima and a white kidney bean - it is flatter and shorter than a kidney bean and yet not as wide as a lima - and has been known forever since as the Tarbais bean.
Traditionally, the Tarbais bean grows jointly with corn: because the Tarbais is of the climbing variety, farmers would seed one bean and one corn kernel side by side so that the bean would use the corn stalk as a stake.
The arrival of intensive farming - hybrid corn varieties, machine harvesting, and all that - in the 1960s almost wiped out the production of the famous bean of Tarbes - it seems few had time for a bean that was harvested by hand.
Fortunately, the precious seeds were not completely lost and got transferred from one generation's bean patch to the next.
During the 1980s, a handful of farmers decided to jump-start the traditional production of the Tarbais on a larger scale in the terroir it liked best.
The Tarbais is still harvested by hand, only when it is at peak ripeness. This labor-intensive process is the only way to ensure the quality of the final product.
All the hard work has paid off: the "Label Rouge" was granted to the Tarbais in 1996, the first time the coveted recognition was awarded to a bean. It also benefits from an IGP (Indication Géographique Protégée), which specifies the exact area where it can be cultivated, essentially on the Adour plain of the Hautes-Pyrénées department.
THIS PRODUCT IS PACKAGED IN A FACILITY THAT ALSO HANDLES WHEAT FLOUR, SOY FLOUR, TREE NUTS, PEANUTS, CHOCOLATE (MILK), AND OTHER ALLERGENS
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