Cycling UK Forum

Vorpal wrote:Which veggie sausages or recipes use flageolet beans? I've never seen that before.

Veggie sausages in my experience are generally made with soya, textured vegetable protein, Quorn, or some variant on those, with some vegetable fat and the same sort of herbs and spices as meat sausages. I don't generally care for them, though some are better than others.

Bean sausages, I might like.

I don't know about sausages but field beans are hugely used in pelletised animal feed - which suggests that with a minimum of binding agent and with other ingredients they stick together well.

Veggie sausages? We eat them, but we don't find them particularly inspiring. Perhaps it's because I never really took to meat sausages in the past. Mostly, the supermarket veggie ones go in a sort of meat-free cassoulet or cholent that we sometimes make. We avoid the Tesco own-brand ones like the plague! 'Cauldron' brand are reasonably good.

Our favourites are home-made and not really sausages at all, Glamorgan sausages, which are a sort of croquette made from leeks, breadcrumbs and crumbly cheese. Very tasty and nothing like meat! We've made some amendments to the recipe linked: increased the amount of leeks to 200g, likewise the breadcrumbs, and use Wensleydale, Lancashire, or a crumbly sheeps-milk cheese, instead of Caerphilly (which is rather expensive). Also you can use rosemary or sage instead of thyme. The recipe serves 2 as a main meal.

661-Pete wrote:I've got a bag of half-a-dozen 'penny whistles'. Made of bamboo: one of them sounds like a duck-call, the others like whistles at various pitches. Excellent for street demos and marches

You arent whistling in your Extinction Rebellion pic?

Al

I think Vorpal might be right about Textured Vegetable Protein TVP being mostly made from soya beans.

I made my comment up thread because I vaguely remember hearing it mentioned on a radio program (?) on the BBC within the last few months. I just can remember which one it was. The gist of the story was that was that farmer were changing their practices from growing beans for animal feed to growing beans for human consumption and that part of that was due to increased demand for plant based meat substitutes.

The closed closest item I could find when I did a search was this BBC business article on growing peas for plant based protein from September 2019.

I also looked up what a Flageolet bean was on wikipedia. It seems to be a bean that is harvested early. Maybe the farmers are harvesting them later as a dried bean (haricot). Or they are planting a different type of bean entirely.

The thing that has all the youngsters excited of course is that you can feed more people with fewer resources if people eat the beans directly rather than indirectly by feeding them to farm animals first.

661-Pete, +1 for the Cauldron sausages. My brother, who suffers from allergies, complains that one of the other brands make him feel wheezy.

edit: closed -> closest

6.5_lives_left wrote:I also looked up what a Flageolet bean was on wikipedia. It seems to be a bean that is harvested early. Maybe the farmers are harvesting them later as a dried bean (haricot). Or they are planting a different type of bean entirely.

It seems odd as haricot are flageolet harvested later, but baked beans are haricot and they (on balance I'd say) are smaller than flageolet, certainly not much in it. I suppose if there's a huge demand for haricot the supply of flageolet may suffer.

The bad thing is there's no doubt the D'Aucy flageolet I'm eating now are superior to the supermarket product - so l probably won't ever go back to the cheaper variety.

Ben@Forest wrote:The bad thing is there's no doubt the D'Aucy flageolet I'm eating now are superior to the supermarket product - so l probably won't ever go back to the cheaper variety.

I've only seen D'Aucy in Morrisons supermarkets in the UK.

mjr wrote:

Ben@Forest wrote:The bad thing is there's no doubt the D'Aucy flageolet I'm eating now are superior to the supermarket product - so l probably won't ever go back to the cheaper variety.

I've only seen D'Aucy in Morrisons supermarkets in the UK.

Are they less than 99p a can? If they are then they're cheaper than online, the Tesco's or Sainsburys' own brand were about 60p.

Ben@Forest wrote:

mjr wrote:

Ben@Forest wrote:The bad thing is there's no doubt the D'Aucy flageolet I'm eating now are superior to the supermarket product - so l probably won't ever go back to the cheaper variety.

I've only seen D'Aucy in Morrisons supermarkets in the UK.

Are they less than 99p a can? If they are then they're cheaper than online, the Tesco's or Sainsburys' own brand were about 60p.

I think so but probably not by much and I was last in a Morrisons a year ago because they were abysmal at covid safety measures and screamed at me half way across the shop for trying to go to the express checkouts in the same manner as others. Might have all changed now.

There seems to be a bit of confusion over what type of bean a flageolet is. It is just another cultivar of the Common Bean, Phaseolus vulgaris. Many other cultivars exist: important ones are kidney beans (red, white or speckled), white beans (the ones found in a baked beans tin), black beans, and some types of green or French bean (but not runner beans). Wiki doesn't say what happens to a flageolet bean when it is allowed to fully ripen - perhaps it has no culinary value in that phase.

I know that we have a jar of dried flageolet beans that got 'forgotten' for years at the back of a cupboard, and are now totally inedible. They are a sort of yellowish-brown in colour. Mrs P finds them useful as 'baking beans' when making a flan. At least they can't be mistaken for any edible beans...