The adventures of my La Chamba pot

What started as a quest to find a bean pot to make some authenic Boston Baked Beans, resulted in a trip to Williams-Sonoma and the purchase of this awesome Columbian La Chamba pot. Is this newly aquired La Chamba pot the same as the bean pot I was seeking? No, but it was as close as I could find that would help me get dinner on the table that night.

Just to keep it all straight and to give proper credit to what started all of this. The recipe that I wanted to make was The Pioneer Woman's Boston Baked Beans. If you click on her link, you will see the beautiful bean pot that she used near the bottom.


As an avid cook, I decided I NEED one of those. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Today. Like NOW! Like it already needed to be in my oven simmering away. So my 1st step was to call my mother-in-law and ask her if she had a bean pot. Yes she did and she even told me where I could find it so I could borrow it.


Yes it was a clay pot. Seemed more like ceramic, and it didn't have those high sides. Plus it didn't look very big for my pot full of mouth-watering beans. But I did take it, just in case.


I saunter into Williams-Sonoma, after the obligatory stop at Godiva to fulfill my cravings of good chocolate, and ask for a bean pot. And the guy just sort of stood there and blinked at me. Oh come on! Surely everybody knows what a bean pot is. After all I just learned about one that very morning!! (Not entirely true, I did see an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives where Guy went into some small restaurant and made beans in a bean pot.) So the clerk had to call in some help. Now I am explaining to an older lady what I am looking for. She takes me over to the shelf full of these gorgeous black clay pots in all shapes and sizes. And I fall in love and I buy the round one that most closely resembles my desired bean pot. At this point I really have no idea anything about this pot other than I wanted it.






I come home and wash out the pot and start my beans to cooking. Then I hit the world wide web looking for information about my new pot. Oh and some more ideas of what to cook in it to justify the purchase. Because the little baby was not the cheapest thing to buy and if I just planned on cooking beans in it, the hubby might have been putting my ashes in it.




Here is what I learned:

La Chamba pots are made in a village in Columbia. The same village that has been making them for the past 700 or so years. Almost all of the villagers are involved in this. They are all handmade and fired. Oh and did I mention it's gorgeous?