These are a variety of bean I got from the Seed Ambassadors when they visited Europe, which seems like ages ago now. This year I was going through some of their seeds I hadn’t grown out yet, found these, and decided I better plant them because they wouldn’t last much longer. Because the seeds weren’t fresh any more, the rate of germination was low, but at least I got more seeds than I started with to plant another year.
I don’t really know much about them. When I got the seeds the label on the original package was hard to read, and as it turned out the name was misspelled. I showed it to a few Portuguese speaking friends, but none of them could decipher what the original name was supposed to be. Even typing the name I had into Google didn’t show any results. After quite a bit of online researching, my conclusion is that these are supposed to be called Feijão Carioca Cinza or Gray Carioca Beans. Carioca is the Portuguese word used to describe someone native to Rio de Janeiro. There is an apparently very common type of Brazilian bean called Carioca Beans, but what I have is a little different. I seem to have a special ‘gray’ variation of the standard bean that is normally light brown. Even though my beans are called gray, they are almost a little blue in color. They are small, roughly pea sized.
Does anyone know any more about this bean? Does anyone have any traditional Brazilian recipes that go along with it?
