What Happens When Nate Ducks "Bean Bread"

After sunday's experience and yesterday's post about our new grain mill, I got excited to read about bean flour and decided to duck (that's the private version of googling something using DuckDuckGo) "bean bread." When I say I'm excited, I mean I'm excited.

It seems bean bread is in fact a thing! I kinda chuckled when I was searching it, thinking to myself that it sounds a little funny, but apparently it was a popular native American food! And that recipe puts it right up my dietary alley:

It uses lard 😍

I wonder how that'd taste with some sausage in it...(Source)

(In the comments, it says vegans can substitute Crisco, but it will make the flavor more bland. I'm not a fan of Crisco, but don't let my preferences keep you from trying something.)

In one of my community groups, a local farmer recently advertised pig fat for sale from his ethically raised pastured and forested mangalitsa pigs. And for only $2.50 a pound! I got five pounds to render. It was a nice subject to talk about with @bobydimitrov, who lives where these pigs are traditionally from! Turns out the way our farmer raises his pigs isn't too far from the traditional style of raising them. True to the translation of their name, meaning "pig that makes a lot of lard," the fat from these awesome animals gave 1.1 pints of rendered lard per pound of fat. That's 520mL per 0.45kg. That yield is ten percent more than any fat I've rendered before, usually coming in at a pint per pound. Last time we did two pounds of fat and the quart of lard lasted us nearly a year. This way we'll have lard to trade with folks in our intentional community.

Five and a half pints of lard

Anyways, back to beans. I guess that recipe doesn't use bean flour, but it uses corn flour and beans. Beans are a food I'm going to be growing more of this year. Bush green beans like last year of course, and this year I'm adding pole dry beans. I've got two native varieties that I'm going to be growing, so they'll fit in perfect with that recipe. It's somewhat of a bean tamal. The tamal, or the plural tamales, is one of Nate's favorite foods. When I started looking into ancestral and traditional foods and ways to prepare them (I don't know as much as that sentence makes it sound lol), I found out that tamales are an old way of preparing corn. They use the process called nixtamalization to unlock the nutrients in corn by boiling it with wood ash. It's a process I've been interested in ever since I heard of it. How ancient people figured these things out is beyond me. It'd take a really awesome level of knowing oneself to realize hey, when I eat this corn with Ash on it, I feel better than when I eat corn without Ash on it.

Anyways. I just wanted to share what I'd found. I don't know that it's coincidence that all these things are coming together like this, but maybe it is. I'll keep my eyes open and keep ducking things like bean bread hoping things will line up like this some more.

Love from Texas

Nate 💚