Lupin Bean - 40% Protein Superfood?

I came upon a very interesting article about the ancient, "lowly" lupin bean and its potential as a high value food along with very high protein content. Apparently there are both European and North American native species. They're growing them in Australia too, a sweeter variety. Anybody heard of this before?

https://nationalpost.com/news/could-the-unassuming-lupin-bean-become-the-next-superfood

P.S. Mods, I don't know if this is the right forum. Move if appropriate. Thanks!

The lupini bean has garnered my interest as well. A common tapas in some places. Processing some varieties seems labor intensive. Lupini flour is readily available for GF people. I purchased a pound of them to plant  but my 2021 projects over reached my time. Curious to see what you discover. "Brami' makes a snacking fermented bean similar to what  I've experienced as a tapas, you can get them off of Amazon.

Garden Organic had a members experiment in the UK a couple of years ago. I was disappointed to learn that the lupin seed provided for the edible varieties were annual varieties. There was a white seeded one that was supposed to prefer hotter summers, so I grew it in the polytunnel. and a blue seeded one that was supposed to be better for the UK so I tried it outside. Neither did great (I would have been better off eating the seed than planting it!) so I never got to try eating any. The few seed I harvested I passed on to a friend further south to try and I suspect her slugs ate them. The outdoor ones did start off OK, but I think they got some sort of insect damage which distorted the growing tips and the flowers.
I occasionally see lupin as an ingredient on biscuits and other baked goods from Europe.
I`d like to try the perennial lupin seeds, my single plant that survived the slug barrier experiment, flowers and sets pretty well. I know the seed from this will require leaching, and haven`t got round to trying that yet. I`m not sure the annual forms are worth trying again in my climate. broad (fava) beans do pretty well for me, and are quite nutritious too.

I read a lovely review of them where some magazine had sent the seeds out to 50 or so people they found the split about 50/50 of people liking the taste or not liking the taste, they were using one of the sweet varieties.  They sound interesting Though the yield would need to be decent as well since peas and broad beans both come in at 25 ish % and are easy to grow.

I got some of the Andean species (known there as tarwi and by a few other common names) from the seed bank. They're a cultivated crop with good sized beans. The recommendation for those is to soak in water starting in the morning, changing the water that night and again the next morning, and then enjoy for dinner. Levels of alkaloids can differ between species and varieties, but that's a basic leaching schedule. The European method takes way longer (like weeks) and is way more convoluted (which may be down to European varieties containing more alkaloids.) At any rate, if they're still bitter after leaching and cooking, toss them and leach the next batch for longer. Leaching time should be consistent over the course of an entire batch.

I didn't have irrigation and our drought started 2 months early this year, and I didn't want to risk the seed, so unfortunately I didn't get to grow and try them. Looking forward to giving them a go this coming season.

Bill Whitson of Cultivariable actually recommends the non-sweet varieties, since the alkaloids deter pests and are relatively painless to leach out.

If you search for tarwi I have a post where I posted a couple of cookbooks released by NGOs in Latin America that were aiming to increase the popularity of once popular crops. They include tarwi as well as grains like quinoa and amaranth, and tubers like oca and ulluco. The cookbooks are in Spanish, but they include pictures and are pretty basic recipes that can fairly easily be translated. Especially with a smartphone that can translate text from pictures.

Here's the post with the cookbooks: https://permies.com/t/149433/Tarwi-chocho-cultivation#1169548

And would you look at that? It was posted exactly a year ago today.

Different names! So that's why my search didn't turn up anything. Thanks!