Hodmedod

There’s so much about what we eat and how it’s grown and made that we just completely take for granted - but that when you start thinking about is utterly bizarre. Like how the foods we in the U.K. tend celebrate as defining parts of our culture are more often than not the product of late 19th and early 20th century industrial processes and access to global resources through colonialism: things like boiled sweets, golden syrup, chocolate digestives, custard powder, jam, KitKats, canned soup, Dundee cake… baked beans. Most baked beans available in the U.K. (not Hodmedod’s) are made with small white beans (variously called haricot or navy) grown in North America - generally around the Great Lakes. Often the beans have been bred to better suit canning and have thicker skins which split less easily and cotyledons (the two halves of the seed) that are less likely to break up under the heat and pressure of canning into glass or steel. I often (always!) talk about how the UK needs to up its game and eat more pulses - and encouraging people to do that is very much Hodmedod’s purpose - but in one department our islands are consistently world beating: Baked Beans! We eat more per capita than anyone else. Around 2.5 million cans are sold EVERY DAY in the UK. 🤯 Yet this seemingly quintessentially British food is near entirely imported; tomatoes, spices, beans - even the recipe originated with Indigenous people from the east of North America; folk like the Iroquois, Narragansett and Penobscot. And our preferred way of eating them (on toast)? Not a spontaneous cultural quirk but a marketing strategy to shift more baked beans… designed by Heinz in the 1920s 😂 So last week, with the launch of this years Hodmedod ‘rare’ beans (rare because they’re near impossible to grow here), I thought I’d have a go at making my own baked beans with delicious Norfolk-grown Borlotti. For me the creamy beans, the way some burst to thicken the sauce, and the near meaty flavour make Borlotti perfect - the best - for baked beans. I soaked a bag (or was it two 😬), pressure cooked them with some stock, olive oil, onion, garlic, a big teaspoon of harissa & a bay leaf. Once they were cooked I put in a little bit of passata and about a tablespoon of tomato puree. I let it cook down gently then took a ladle of beans and sauce out and blended them with a couple of teaspoons each of balsamic vinegar, honey and tamari. I mixed the bean paste back into the main saucepan of beans, let it reduce for 5 or 10 minutes, adjusted the seasoning and ate it old school - on Wakelyns Bakery toast with a bit cheddar grated on top. The BEST baked beans. Hodmedod have more RARE beans coming… get on the mailing list 😉

A couple weeks ago I had the chance to hang out with a few of the dedicated and visionary people who are helping to fuel the 'bean renaissance' here in the UK – Amelia Christie-Miller of Bold Bean Co, Josiah Meldrum of Hodmedod's and farmer James Bucher of Hall Farm in Knettishall, Suffolk. I was already a full-on bean convert but my visit to see where and how carlin peas (a 'heritage' pea/bean that's making a deserved comeback) are being grown regeneratively, and the difference they can make to soil (and human) health bowled me over. Read more in my latest post... https://lnkd.in/eHmH3re9 #beans #beanrenaissance #regenag #regenerativeagriculture #carlinpeas

Should we be eating more weeds? (And if we do, are they still weeds?!) Leaving aside questions about weeds as social construct, we definitely need more diversity in our diets and in our fields. Humans eat around 200 plant species - sounds a lot, but there are over 7,000 edible species and over 250,000 more potentially edible species. And of the 200 we do eat, more than half our plant-origin calories and protein comes from just 3: wheat, rice and maize (and within those three species an ever diminishing number of varieties). At the same time farmers spend a lot of time - and money - removing weeds from their fields, something that’s harder to do if you don’t use herbicides, and the removal of herbicides is a critical part of regenerative organic farming. For the last 5 or 6 years I’ve been fascinated by the idea that we (Hodmedod's British Pulses, Grains & Seeds ) might find a home for edible weed seeds harvested alongside the intended crop - and that we could introduce this wild diversity into our diets. We’ve been thinking about them as accidental intercrops. Sometimes wild species growing in crops suppress yields, but generally not to the extent you might imagine. And they can bring significant benefits - supporting diversity above and below ground, potentially helping the crop access nutrients, attract pollinators, even offering structural support. A couple of years ago we bought wild mustard seeds from some organic bean crops . The beans had done badly, but by buying the mustard too we were able to make a decent return per hectare - certainly comparable to a good year for beans. This year we’ve separated poppy seeds from organic oats (they’re actually 2023 harvest - but there’s been a fair bit of thinking and fiddling with this first crop). It’s looking like there’ll be an excellent poppy harvest with our marrowfat peas this year. Harvests aren’t huge, but these are high value foods and the return to farm, though modest, could make low imput systems a little more attractive. And, of course, there’s nothing new under the sun. Recent analysis of Tollund Man’s stomach (his 2,500 year old body preserved in a peat bog) has shown that what were once thought to be weed seeds accidentally included in his cereal porridge are more likely seeds of plants that grew as weeds in the fields, were removed after harvest, and then saved and intentionally reintroduced as an ingredient - because of the ratios they’re present in. Are you ready to eat the weeds that aren’t weeds?! https://lnkd.in/ebe6SPfs (Oh, and if it sounds like we’re removing diversity by removing these seeds - they’d be removed from the field anyway as part of the harvest process, we’re just finding ways to eat them) #organicfarming #nutrition

About 15 years ago Nick Saltmarsh William and I had one of those revelatory moments - a realisation that changed our lives. Despite working in what you might call (we wouldn’t) the alternative food sector for years - for various NGOs, farmers coops, food wholesalers and retailers - we’d completely overlooked dry beans and peas (pulses). In particular those that could be grown here relatively easily - fava beans (small dry broad beans) and dry peas of various varieties. We weren’t alone. Fava beans have been grown in the UK for at least a couple of thousand years, and for much of that time they were absolutely central to the diet of our islands - not least because they’re such a great overwinter store of nutrition. But for the last few hundred years they’ve mostly been used for animal feed. Why? As we industrialised and urbanised fava beans became stigmatised as poor people’s food. At the same time we got better at keeping animals through the winter and beans and peas of all types became less important. Where we did eat them we chose varieties from the ‘new’ world that had higher status - but that just don’t really grow here very well. But fava beans really should be at the centre of agricultural rotations and in the middle of our plates - good for our own and for planetary health. In 2012 we set out to create a route to market for them: Hodmedod's British Pulses, Grains & Seeds - to get them eaten and to celebrate the extraordinary global cuisine and culture that has grown up around them over the last 6000+ years. We also wanted to encourage farmers to grow them - to find ways to make them work economically and agronomically (as an overlooked crop there’s been underinvestment in breeding and agronomy). Over the years we’ve met and worked with some amazing people - folk like Roger Vickers Pietro Iannetta and Donal O'Sullivan working on crop science farmers like Balcaskie Estate willing to grow particular varieties in particular ways and people like Wildfarmed up for talking to us and working with us on intercropping at scale. But perhaps most exciting is how the narrative is slowly shifting. Back in 2012 we were almost certainly the biggest buyers of U.K. fava beans who planned to sell in the U.K. for food not feed (most are exported or fed to animals). We’re probably still the biggest buyer, but we’re definitely buying more than a few tonnes at a time. And now uk fava beans are snacks (our own first, but now the likes of graze and lots of own brands), they’re in cans, they’re in prepared foods (such as THIS™ meat alternatives) ready meals and meal kits. This morning they even hit the BBC News with Amelia Christie-Miller from Bold Bean talking to the Today Programme about bean recipes in a piece about research Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University (SLCU) are carrying to better understand the amazing health benefits of fava beans. Fava beans make you happy! #fact 😂 (And here are a few more recipes: https://lnkd.in/e8SgjH_6)