We've been serving lima beans and pinquito beans from Lompoc Valley Seed & Mill since we opened Sea Rocket Bistro last year, and I finally got the chance to go visit them and see how beans are born. The Lompoc Valley apparently has the right climate for growing several different varieties of beans, and this company mills both their own as well as beans that they buy from other places in California. The two varieties of beans we serve at the bistro are both grown and milled there- we make both Lima Bean Salad and Lima Bean Spread (like hummus) and use the pinquito beans in our Lamb & Pinquito Bean Chili.

What struck me about the process of milling is how much it's like Chutes and Ladders! The beans are loaded from the ground floor, carried up elevators, dumped into chutes that direct them onto sorting trays, get shuffled around for sizing and quality control, and then are dropped through large funnels into canvas bags for shipping. And yet this incredibly mechanical process is now accompanied by a very high-tech sorting computer that can analyze enormous quantities of beans and pick any imperfections out with super speed and accuracy, lending a contemporary twist to the process that I found quite fascinating!

A mill is a noisy place however, so I apologize if you can't hear some of the audio too well.

Lompoc Beans, Part 1

Lompoc Beans, Part 2