Tiger's Eye Beans - A bit of a mystery!
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Tiger's Eye beans have been the hardest bean for me to learn anything about. They are from either Chile or Argentina and are also known as Pepa de Zapallo (pumpkin seed). And that's really all I could actually find about them. I've tried to learn more, but that's what we've got!
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If you bought Tiger's Eye beans from us before December, we grew those! And if you bought them after, they are from Brisa Ranch in Pescadero, CA (170 miles south of us). They are 2 varieties of the same Tiger's Eye bean. Boonville grown Tiger's Eye are more golden and slim while Brisa grown Tiger's Eye are darker brown and thicker.
The Tiger's Eye seed stock that we've grown for the past 4 or so years were also one of the improved varieties from UC-Davis (like the Southwest Gold beans). They are beautiful golden beans with maroon stripes. The funny thing about really beautiful beans is that they kinda just turn into regular brown beans when cooked.
Our friends at Brisa Ranch have grown Tiger's Eye beans and saved the seed at their Pescadero farm for the past 7 years, adapting the seed to their cool Central Coast climate.
Growing Tiger's Eye Beans
Tiger's Eye beans have consistently been the first bean we harvest and thresh each year, which means that we get quite frustrated with them when we relearn how to use our thresher and seed cleaner and remember all the little tricks about harvesting beans. The Tiger's Eye beans always test our patience for waiting until beans are actually ready to be harvested, for waiting till beans are actually ready to thresh, for ensuring we've got the right amount of bean plants in the thresher for it to work and that we're going at the right speed, and that we've got the right screen in our bean cleaner for the non-bean bits to be sorted out.
One issue with these beans is that they tend to shatter easily in the field. This means that the pods open up when they are just about fully dry and drop the beans on the ground. We have to be careful when harvesting them as well because the pods will shatter when the plant is harvested and when the plant is drying. I've been known to go down the rows of Tiger's Eye beans on my knees trying to collect everything that has dropped. We tried to mitigate shatter loss last fall by harvesting the beans a little earlier (you can see the leaves are still green and have not totally died off) and putting them right on a tarp. We harvested the Tiger's Eye beans on August 22nd and 30th and cleaned them all on September 6th. Overall we produced 177 pounds of these beans in 2025.
This fall we also purchased some Tiger's Eye beans from Brisa Ranch in Pescadero. Brisa Ranch is a 130 acre operation with 45 of the acres in active annual crop production. It is owned and operated by Cristóbal Cruz Hernández, Veronica Mazariegos-Anastassiou, and Cole Mazariegos-Anastassiou. The three started the farm together in 2018 after working together at other Central Coast farms. The farm is certified organic by CCOF and regenerative organic by Real Organic Project. Their organic certification is what makes these beans more expensive than our Boonville grown beans. Veronica and I met at a farm business retreat last year. She's a farming powerhouse that is working really hard to help farmers in her area access other sales markets through the creation of the Central Coast Food Hub. Brisa Ranch received a huge CDFA Farms to Community Food Hubs grant to make this happen. We're so excited for them.
Many farms in the Central Coast area grow dry beans and Brisa Ranch uses dry beans in their crop rotation to fix nitrogen in the soil when preparing a field for a future nitrogen intensive crop (like strawberries). They also intercrop beans on a smaller scale with corn and winter squash. Beans are also an important storage crop for the farm as they provide income in the winter when fresh produce production and sales are slow.
Brisa Ranch grew 400 pounds of the Tiger's Eye beans and harvested, threshed, and cleaned all of these beans by hand! That's more than double our harvest of these beans and we have machines to help us with the threshing and cleaning of them.
My Essentials for Cooking Beans
There's 3 things that I find really helpful for cooking a pot of beans: the pot, a kettle, and a storage container.
I cook almost every pot of beans in a 4.5 quart Lodge Enameled Dutch Oven. It's big enough to cook a full pound of beans with enough head space for extra water, but small enough that it isn't too big and heavy to lug around. The Lodge dutch oven is also much more affordable than the Le Creuset version.
I have a basic Hamilton Beach electric kettle to keep water hot for refilling the pot as needed. I could boil an extra pot of water on the stove but the kettle helps reduce the amount of steam in the kitchen. I turn it on while the beans are undergoing their 15 minute boil and refill it as needed.
Having a container that will fit a full pound of cooked beans is quite helpful. I picked up two of these 61 ounce glass food storage containers from IKEA a few months ago. Once my pot of beans is finished cooking on the stove, I transfer it to the glass container to cool completely on the counter and then pop it in the fridge. It's much easier to scoop the beans out of here than from a jar.
How to Cook Tiger's Eye Beans
I don't get to eat a lot of Tiger's Eye beans. In fact, cooking them last week was probably the first time I ate them in a few years. This is because they are not the most productive bean on the farm and we sell as many as we can and hold about 15 pounds back for seeding the crop the following year. This doesn't leave any extra for us. Thanks to my mom for having a bag in her pantry so I could try some of these recipes with our beans as well as some from Brisa Ranch!
My takeaway with Tiger's Eye beans is that they break down in a really creamy way. They are not a great bean if you want each individual bean to hold its shape (like Zolfini beans do) in the dish you are making. I still think that the best comparison would be a pinto bean. I admit that these recipes are all quite brown and gloopy. But they tasted great!
Remember: for recipe conversions, 1 can of beans is about 1.5 cups of cooked beans. 1 pound of dry beans equals about 6 cups of cooked beans. If you make a pot of beans and have leftover that you don't plan to eat throughout the week, you can freeze a container of beans in their cooking liquid. You might want to do 1.5 or 3 cups of beans at a time so that it easily converts to 1 or 2 cans of beans for your next recipe.
Refried Beans and how to use them
Refried Beans: Whenever people ask me what to cook with Tiger's Eye beans, my first though is Refried Beans. This is because these beans break down more than our other beans do. They already have a lot of creaminess to them and aren't too starchy. Refried beans can be made with a variety of fats (lard, olive oil, etc) and the important thing is that you do actually fry them in the fat (they aren't just mashed up or blended beans!). This recipe from Serious Eats gives you ideas of ways to mash them and different cooking fats to use. If you're a NYT Cooking subscriber, there's a good Olive Oil Refried Beans recipe from Samin Nosrat that I'd recommend, too.
While I do love a good side of refried beans, there's so many great ways to use them as part of the dish instead of just to fill out a plate. Here's a few ideas.
Sopes: I LOVE sopes. There's something about having like a little crunchy salad on top of a masa cake that is the perfect lunch. And I really miss the Mexican restaurant here in Boonville where I used to get sopes regularly for lunch. While you can fill them with anything, a good scoop of refried beans in the bottom of the masa bowl help round it out.
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Molletes: As someone who has a hard time finding a breakfast food to regularly eat, I might have found my new favorite option with Molletes. This uses bolito rolls or a baguette sliced open as the base and then gets topped with a layer of refried beans, melty Oaxacan cheese, and finished with pico de gallo. Last week I got frustrated after spending an evening making a bean/hominy/chicken stew that didn't taste great. Not only did I not want to eat it again, but I was annoyed that the recipe I had picked for the Tiger's Eye beans didn't really work. I went back and looked for an alternative and found Molletes. I made these with the loaf of sourdough bread I had on hand, pepper jack cheese, and store bought pico de gallo because it's what we had in the fridge and I didn't want to venture out in a stormy night. I loved it. The Tiger's Eye made incredibly flavorful refried beans (I used our olive oil as the fat) and it was just a really simple and perfect combo of satisfying flavors. It was a great not too hard to make dinner and an even more delicious breakfast the next day.
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Soupy/Braised Beans
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Snack
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Lemony Tiger's Eye Bean Dip: This is a perfect snack to enjoy after work or on a Sunday afternoon that gives you a bit more energy/protein for the rest of the day. The addition of sumac helps amp up the lemon flavor in the dip and helps cut the richness of the beans. This would be really good in late summer with broiled cherry tomatoes right from the garden. Bean use: 2 cups of cooked beans or make based on however many cups of beans you have left!
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