What do Jackson Wonder, Black Calypso, Cannellini, Pinquito, Canario, and Baby Lima have in common? They are all varieties of dried beans. I recently received a box with one twelve-ounce bag of each variety along with a baseball cap with the producer’s name on it. It was my prize for winning a recipe contest they sponsored on their Facebook page. What does this mean for you? Until the supply is gone, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of recipes on these pages using dried beans. This posting is the first of those recipes.

I started with the Jackson Wonder beans because I liked their black and white patterned skin. Of course, the first thing I did was to grind them into a powder so the pattern really didn’t make a difference. Like the two previous dried bean postings on this blog—haricots soufflées (bean biscuits) and crêpe des haricots au fromage blanc de chèvre(“King of the Early” crepe with goat cheese)—I’m still enamored with using the beans as flour rather than whole.

The idea for this recipe came from my love for fresh chow fun, the Cantonese name for fried, fresh rice noodles. (The noodle, before it is cooked, is called ho fun in Cantonese.) Although I make chow fun at home, it is usually better in a restaurant where they have a much hotter pan to fix it in. The best was at a long-gone restaurant named Andy’s in downtown Mountain View, California. I think the restaurant has been gone since the early 1980s when modern Chinese food eliminated the touristy chop-suey houses of the previous hundred years. I didn’t like most food at Andy’s, but I did like their pork chow fun. I’d sit at the counter and order a plate all for myself. I think the price was $3.95. What made their chow fun stand out was that the edges of the noodles were slightly brown and crispy.

Now, when I’m in a dim sum house I usually have the ho fun plain as a simple wide roll of noodle with a sweetened soy sauce drizzled over it. When I started to think about what to do with 4-1⁄2 pounds of beans, that dim sum dish was one of the first dishes that came to mind. After watching a couple of YouTube videos in various languages prepare normal, rice-based ho fun, the process seemed possible with beans, and I headed to the kitchen.