Lamon Beans

Fagiolo di Lamon della Vallata Bellunese is a protected geographical indication, registered in 1996, covering four ecotypes of common bean grown on the Lamon plateau and in the Belluno valley in the Veneto, at the foot of the Dolomites.

The four have local names and distinct characters. Spagnolit is the smallest and roundest, with the thinnest skin and the sweetest flavour. Spagnolo is large and flattened with broad wine-red streaks. Calonega is elongated and mottled, the most widely grown today. Canalino is small, cylindrical and early-ripening.

What they share, and the reason the designation exists, is the skin. In a Lamon bean it is so fine and tender as to be barely perceptible: it does not separate during cooking and leaves none of the papery sensation that industrial borlotti do. The flesh is floury and turns creamy without a blender.

They are sold dried, and also fresh in the pod in September and October. Certified production is small, a few hundred tonnes a year, and that single figure explains almost everything that happens on supermarket labels.

Sweet, chestnut-like and mild, with none of the metallic edge that cheap dried beans carry. The dominant impression is textural: the skin dissolves, the interior is floury and smooth, and a well-cooked pot of them thickens its own liquid into something close to a sauce.

Fresh from the pod in September they taste greener and lighter, closer to a fresh borlotto but sweeter, and they cook in forty minutes.

The honest test is the plainest dish. Warm beans, raw sliced onion, olive oil, vinegar and salt, nothing else. A mediocre bean is exposed immediately; a Lamon carries the plate on its own. That, more than any recipe, is why people in Belluno pay for them.

Soak for six to eight hours in plenty of cold water, less than most dried beans need. Skip the bicarbonate of soda entirely: it damages precisely the thin skin you paid for.

Cook from cold, unsalted water, on the lowest possible heat with the lid ajar. Ninety minutes for dried beans, forty for fresh from the pod. Salt goes in for the last ten minutes only, or the skins toughen, and the pot must never reach a rolling boil or the beans split.

Never throw away the cooking liquid. It is starchy, sweet and full of flavour, and it is the base of Venetian pasta e fagioli, where half the beans are puréed into it and half are left whole.

Three local dishes are worth copying. Bean and barley soup. Warm beans dressed with raw sliced onion, olive oil, vinegar and salt: a dish so plain it only works with a good bean. And fagioli in salsa: anchovies melted into oil with garlic and parsley, spooned over the beans and eaten on grilled polenta.

Outside tradition, they make an excellent purée finished with raw olive oil, and they are very good pan-fried with bitter radicchio and speck.

Dried beans keep for a long time and change the whole while. Store them in an airtight jar in a cool dark cupboard at 15 to 20 C, away from steam and sunlight, and note the harvest year rather than only the date on the pack. As they age they keep losing moisture and the seed coat hardens, so soaking takes longer, cooking times stretch, and more skins split and slip off in the pot; the crimson streaks fade toward brown over a year and the beans dull all over. Beans from two different years cook at different speeds and are best not mixed in one pan.

Fresh pods are a short-season product that sits in the fridge drawer at 0 to 4 C for a few days, and shelled fresh beans freeze at minus 18 C for several months without much loss. Cooked beans keep in the fridge for three or four days, and they should stay in their own cooking liquid, because drained beans dry out and the skins wrinkle and tighten. They freeze well in that liquid too, in portions, for a few months.

The label to find is Fagiolo di Lamon della Vallata Bellunese IGP, usually on a cloth or jute bag with a consortium tag and one of four ecotype names: Spagnolit, Spagnolet, Calonega or Canalino. The beans themselves are large and plump for a borlotto, with a notably thin skin and a cream ground marked in bright crimson to purple streaks that look painted rather than speckled. Look for the harvest year on the bag, because it tells you more than anything else about how the beans will behave in the pot. In late summer they also appear fresh in streaked red pods.

Abroad the shelf will offer borlotti or cranberry beans, which are the same family grown at scale in Italy, China or the Americas: thicker skinned, duller in colour, and a fraction of the price. Pinto beans are uniformly tan and freckled, without the crimson. American Roman beans are the same as cranberry. Sorana and Controne beans from further south are white. An IGP bag from Lamon costs several times a supermarket bag of borlotti.

Certified Lamon beans are hard to find outside Italy, and the reason is arithmetic: certified output is a few hundred tonnes a year. Italian specialists and mountain co-operatives sell direct, and importers such as Gustiamo in the US and Italian delicatessens in the UK carry small quantities. Expect 12 to 20 dollars for a 500 g pack in the US, roughly 11 to 18 dollars a pound, and 10 to 18 pounds in the UK.

The label must read Fagiolo di Lamon della Vallata Bellunese IGP with the EU mark. Anything sold as 'borlotto di Lamon' without the designation refers to a seed type and can have been grown anywhere: legal, common, and not the same thing.

Two further checks. Look for the harvest year: dried beans stiffen with age, and a three-year-old bean will never turn creamy no matter how long you cook it. And treat a price of a few euros a kilo as proof in itself that you are not buying the IGP.

Lamon itself, in the third week of September, holds the Festa del Fagiolo, the one moment when fresh beans in the pod are easy to find, producers sell direct from the plateau, and the village kitchens serve soups and fagioli in salsa all weekend.

Through the winter, trattorie across the Feltre area and the Belluno valley keep them on the menu with polenta and mountain cured meats. Feltre, with its walled old town, is the practical base, and Belluno's October markets are the best place to buy from a grower and ask which year the crop is from.

Higher up, towards the Vette Feltrine and the Dolomiti Bellunesi national park, kitchen gardens still grow beans up maize stalks the way the whole plateau once did. It takes one look to understand the system.