Can lima beans become the new brussels sprouts? Philly-area farmers hope to reform their image.

Sarah Dohle is a Bucks County native, a former Delaware Valley University professor, and a phaseolus curator — or bean keeper — for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She has long loved legumes, but she was deeply skeptical of one bean for years.

“Lima beans? They’re the only bean I don’t like,” Dohle told an interviewer when she was applying to a lab studying insect resistance in lima beans.

“You’re cooking them wrong,” the scientist she was interviewing countered.

Afterward, Dohle went out and bought dried lima beans (also known as butter beans) and cooked them the way she would a batch of pinto beans. Suddenly, she became a convert.

“Boil it or stick it in a pressure cooker, then [lima beans] are super-delicious,” Dohle said. “They are creamier and smoother and more fine-flavored than regular bean. Like a luxury bean.”

Dohle, now based in Washington state, is spearheading a USDA grant-funded initiative aimed at building better lima beans — ones that home cooks and restaurant customers will clamor for. Lab scientists, food scientists, farmers, and seed companies all have a role to play if this four-year, multi-center project is to succeed. Surprisingly, so do Philadelphians.

“If eaters in the Northeast are like, ‘Lima beans are the sexiest, most nutritious, trendiest thing,’ then other people will want to eat them,” Dohle says. “You know how Brussels sprouts had their day on the appetizer menu? Lima beans, butter beans, at every hipster bar.”

Brussels sprouts are a helpful example in understanding the behind-the-scenes efforts that go into making a polarizing plant wildly popular. Sprouts didn’t buck their bad reputation until after 1998, when a Dutch scientist identified the chemical compounds that made them bitter. From there, seed companies started breeding out the bitterness, cross-pollinating the mildest and highest-yielding varieties to get the best of both worlds.

But tastier sprouts wouldn’t have gotten so far if it weren’t for restaurant chefs who served up rendition after rendition of flavorful sprouts — basted in bacon fat, deep-fried, caramelized — in the ’00s. Recipe writers and cookbook authors joined in, spreading the craze to home kitchens. As the vegetable became ubiquitous on menus, farmers started growing more of them and fetching better prices.

Dohle and her collaborators hope to set off a similar ripple effect with their lima bean project. Ultimately, they’d like more farmers to grow lima beans. As legumes, they’re not only good for people but also good for soil quality, enriching it with nitrogen. And limas are a promising crop for a future with increasingly unpredictable weather.

“The Northeast is getting really wet days and then really dry — like drought, flood, drought, flood. That’s happening all over the country ... and lima beans seem to be able to withstand that. And we don’t know why,” Dohle says. “We think the lima bean has potentially more environmental-stress tolerance hidden in its genome.”

To fully understand those benefits, labs at UC Davis, Clemson, University of Delaware, and UC Riverside will study lima beans, growing hundreds of seed samples, collecting plant DNA, analyzing traits, and identifying genetic markers. As they go, they’ll loop in end consumers. Food scientists at Delaware Valley University and Iowa State University will conduct taste-tests and consumer-preference surveys to triangulate limas’ most appealing qualities. With time, the research will knit together, enabling scientists and seed companies to breed in desirable characteristics for both farmers and bean eaters.

“The research is driven by the stakeholders — the farmers, the chefs, the cafeteria-menu creators — not by the researchers,” Dohle says.

If the USDA wants lima beans to become a top crop, they need people to demand them. Dohle and her collaborators want to rope in large-scale players, like industrial farmers and school-meal programs, and they’re tailoring part of the work to their needs (think large, white beans).

But another aspect of their project celebrates the diversity of the lima bean. For that, they need to cultivate a different audience. “We’re looking for farmers ... and consumers who actually love beans to recognize that lima beans have all the shape, color, pattern, and texture variation that other beans have,” Dohle said.

Enter Philly.

On a cool Sunday morning in May, a disparate group of volunteers — from college students to senior citizens — sat on tree stumps in a vacant lot-turned-community garden in Southwest Philly. They all answered a call from the chef-led community garden/food organization the People’s Kitchen to come out and plant lima beans.

“Breeding doesn’t have to be something that’s done in the lab,” Dohle told the group as she explained her project. “You literally can rub flower parts together in your garden, then you get these new varieties and save seeds from your favorite ... That’s what we’ve done for 10,000 years.”

She passed around the six varieties of lima bean seeds they’d plant that day to illustrate their diversity. Some were flat, white, and familiar, like a dried butter bean. Others were maroon, speckled, and beady.

Dohle has distributed seeds to Pipersville’s Plowshare Farms, Morganics Family Farm in Hillsborough, N.J., and the People’s Kitchen. The farms will conduct field tests, growing numerous seed varieties, identifying which grow best in their region, and getting the resulting lima beans to local chefs and home cooks who help determine which varieties taste best. Those decisions, in turn, may well influence the mainstream.

Lima beans aren’t a popular crop in our region, in part because they’re photoperiod sensitive — they require long nights to trigger flowering, something northern latitudes preclude. But if Dohle and company can find genetic workarounds for that, their work may combine with the farmers’ field tests in a way that creates a regional specialty.

Dohle imagined that outcome for the People’s Kitchen volunteers: “You’ll have a Philadelphia lima bean that people will come here in the fall to eat, like some people go to New Mexico to eat Hatch chilies or they go to France to drink Champagne.”

It sounds far-fetched, but consider the runaway success of plant-breeding experiments like the honeynut squash, a sweet mini-butternut that a Cornell University plant breeder perfected after receiving feedback from chef Dan Barber. When the squash made a splashy debut at a chef’s conference in 2013, seed companies took note. Ten years later, honeynuts are available nationwide when fall rolls around.

“Chefs have influence over the public,” People’s Kitchen organizer Ben Miller told the volunteers. “People weren’t really thinking about local, seasonal [food] until Alice Waters and Judy Wicks.”

Teddy and Faith Moynihan of Plowshare Farms already have strong relationships with the some of the area’s best chefs. The Bucks County farm has hosted farm-to-table dinners in its barn for years with the likes of Sate Kampar’s Ange Branca, Sweet Amalia’s Melissa McGrath, and Honeysuckle Provisions’ Omar Tate. Come September, they’re hosting a lima bean dinner with chef Valerie Erwin of GeeChee Girl Rice Cafe fame. Think of it as an early chapter in remaking lima beans’ image.

“When you say lima beans, people make a face. They get excited or they get kind of grossed out and they want to tell their lima beans story,” Dohle said. “They’re a food that people have an emotional response to.”