Heirloom beans, with their beautiful colors and creamy texture, are having a local moment. As interest in plant- based eating grows, beans continue their trek to an exalted position on the plate. Their reputation as merely a cheap, belly-filling main course when you can’t afford meat is fading, and even people with the means to buy expensive proteins are choosing the humble bean, elevating them into haute cuisine with new spins on old classics.

Different from the standard supermarket bean, heirloom beans have been passed down through families, farms and communities for generations rather than bred for ease in growing and harvesting on a mass scale.

It’s no secret that beans have been catching the attention of top chefs like Thomas Keller. He came across heirloom bean purveyor Rancho Gordo at a Napa farmers market some years ago and started using their beans in his Michelin-starred restaurant The French Laundry.

Here on the Central Coast, small farmers like Blue House Farm in San Gregorio, Iacopi Farms in Half Moon Bay and Fifth Crow Farm and Pie Ranch in Pescadero are growing dozens of varieties of heirloom beans that you can buy at their farm stands, in local farmers markets and through their websites.

Different from the standard supermarket bean, heirloom beans have been passed down through families, farms and communities for generations rather than bred for ease in growing and harvesting on a mass scale. Like any produce carefully grown on small farms, these specialty beans can cost more than standard supermarket beans. But they’re fresher and much more tender and flavorful than packaged beans, which can be 5 years old or more before they land on the grocery store shelf.

The heirloom beans grown by our neighborhood farms originated all over the world—Peru, Mexico, Maine, Virginia, the Caribbean, Africa, France, the Netherlands and beyond.

Sometimes their names hint at their vibrant colors and patterns: Tiger’s Eye, Pinto Pony, Christmas Lima. Other names reveal a bean’s origins: The Anasazi bean was first grown by the Anasazi people of the Southwest; Hutterite beans were brought to the U.S. by a religious group fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe.

When Mike Iacopi’s grandfather immigrated from Italy to Half Moon Bay in the 1930s, he brought with him bean seeds. “My family formally established our farm in 1962, and the cannellini and borlotti and Italian butter beans we grow today are descendants from those that my grandfather carried with him,” he says.

Tom Phipps, another early heirloom bean farmer in the Central Coast, started growing beans in Pescadero in the 1960s. “He sold them through Phipps Country Store and shipped them all over the country,” says Blue House Farm founder Ryan Casey. “His farm was just south of ours, and when we started we bought seeds from him.” Now Phipps’s farm has closed, but his beans live on through all of the growers in this part of Northern California.

Both Blue House and Fifth Crow Farm began growing organic heirloom beans as a way to have shelf-stable items to sell through the winter and to keep their farm crews employed during the off season. “We sow in May and when the plants are 70% yellow, we pull them out and leave them on the ground until they’re completely dry. We want the beans harvested before the rains come in the fall. Then we finish cleaning and packaging the beans starting around January,” says Fifth Crow Farm co-owner Teresa Kurtak.

“Because of our wet drizzly weather, harvesting on the coast is tough,” says Iacopi. “There’s a lot of dew in the morning. The bean shells need to be dry and crisp, so we often have to wait until afternoon to start harvesting. It’s the opposite of hot places in the Central Valley or in Mexico where they often harvest in the middle of the night so that the beans don’t split in the heat of the day.”

If you want to see heirloom bean harvesting in action, Pie Ranch, a nonprofit educational farm, has public work days every month and other volunteer and school programs throughout the year. If you stop by their Highway 1 farmstand to buy produce or a piece of pie, you can wander around the farm and admire the beans and other crops as they grow.

The foggy, misty climate is what may give local beans a leg up when it comes to flavor. Call it bean terroir—the salty, mineral-rich sea air and cool, moderate climate give Central Coast beans a deeper flavor and complex textures that range from velvety and silky to meaty and chewy. “Beans grown here can take longer to ripen than those grown in the much hotter climates of the Central Valley, allowing them to develop a richer flavor,” says Casey.

“Keep in mind that the cooking time for heirloom beans is shorter,” says Pie Ranch’s Tamar Ingber. “They’re fresher and younger than grocery store beans and also have a higher nutritional value. Even though beans last a long time, they do degrade over time. The Hutterite bean is my current favorite. So delicious and creamy. They’re a soft buttery yellow with a bit of green and they almost double in size as they cook.”