Slow cooked Boston Baked Beans recipe
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Pork Ham Bacon Sausages | 24 comments
“American baked beans are different from yours. Heinz are so bland. We have loads of different ways of making beans. Hot, with molasses, with sausage or bacon. There’s real variety in the States.” Mike was giving his beans a final stir before their 8 hour simmer in his crock pot.
I’ve never been a baked bean fan. Danny likes me to buy those tiny tins of beans for his weekend brunch. The Min Pins will wolf down any leftovers but Great Aunt Daisy Beatyl is like me, she’d eat them if there was nothing else left in the world and even then she wouldn’t rush to the table.
The smell of Mike’s beans tantalised me for hours. After a few hours I had fallen in love with the aroma. When I tasted them I knew that this was the start of a passionate affair with the humble haricot.
Saturday night was marked on the calendar as Boston Baked Bean night. I was also cooking Cretan lamb in our slow cooker so the beans were relegated to the Marmite stockpot on the hob. Which dish would I serve?
The lamb was ready after three hours. We agreed to let it simmer away for at least seven hours. This was a big mistake. The lamb needed no chewing, it could easily have been sipped as a health drink. I hadn’t ruined the beans though, so we pounced on the stockpot and gorged.
If you can get a joint salt pork/streaky bacon from your local butcher or cure your own belly of pork, I recommend soaking it for an hour before simmering it for 3 minutes and adding it to the beans. Mike’s going to do this from now on, he used to use dark muscovado sugar and now is switching to light muscovado as this retains the traditional baked bean colour. This dish can be cooked in either in your slow cooker or on the hob and would probably be fine in the slow oven of an Aga.
Mike’s recipe originally came from Slow Cooker recipe book
Boston Baked Beans recipe
Ingredients:
- 500g of dried haricot beans soaked overnight
- 4 small onions (my 4 weighed 350g) peeled and studded with 4 cloves at the base
- 6 tbsp of tomato ketchup
- 2 tbsp of molasses
- 2 tbsp of light muscovado sugar (if you use dark the beans turn out dark brown)
- 1 tbsp of French (Dijon) mustard
- 500ml of vegetable stock to cover
- 200g – 225g joint of salt pork/streaky bacon (soaked for an hour)
- Lashings of ground black pepper (salt will probably be unnecessary).
Method:
- Rinse and soak the beans overnight. Drain and rinse the beans. Put them in a saucepan, cover with plenty of cold water, bring them to the boil and boil gently for 10 minutes. Pour off the water and put the beans into a large casserole dish.
- Put the peeled onions, bases studded with the cloves, clove ends down into the beans.
- Mix the ketchup, mustard, molasses and sugar and pour over the beans.
- Add enough vegetable stock to cover the beans and bring the liquid to a very slow simmer. Simmer for 3 hours (lid on).
- Meanwhile, after 2 hours, soak your salt pork for an hour and then place it in a saucepan of fresh cold water. Bring this to the boil and simmer for 3 minutes. Remove the pork from the water and score the rind deeply (half an inch).
- Pop it into the bean casserole pushing it down between the beans and cook for a further 5 – 6 hours on a very gentle simmer. When the beans are cooked, remove the rind and fat from the pork and tease the flesh apart with a fork. Add the pork to the beans and serve hot with coleslaw.
Tricks and tips:
- The simmer must be a real slow cook low heat, bubbles just brushing the surface simmer. A fast simmer would split the beans and leave you with a mushy mess.
- The beans are very filling so there is no need for potatoes. Crusty bread would be good on the side to calm the ravenous.
- The beans are excellent cold so if you want to kepp them for another meal and do not live alone, hide them in the fridge.
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I’m going to try this as earlier in the week I came across a recipe in a link from Orangette’s blog to fake baked beans, cooked quickly using tinned beans instead of dried. They were quite good but, to me, the sauce was more like brown sauce than tomato. So I’m going to combine the method and do your sauce with tinned haricot beans and see what happens. Just one question though, about molasses. Is tinned treacle the same as molasses?
I kinda cheated on this. I used a kilo of belly pork slices (rindless) which is about 2 packs from somewhere like Asda, each pack has something like 4 strips of pork in them which I cut into thirds so I ended up roughly 24 pieces of pork. 2 x 300/400gm tins of cannellini beans, the molasses I replaced with maple syrup, everything else was pretty much as the recipe here. I gently pan fried the belly pork pieces just to give them a little colour, boiled the canned beans for 10 minutes, then put the beans into a casserole dish, added the sauce mixture and the pork, gave it all a stir and cooked it in a very low oven for about 5 hours, checking to make sure it hadn’t dried up about every time i refilled my wine glass :). We had this at a bbq in the garden and it vanished promptly, it’s now a favourite that I’ve had to start making for family & friends. Have to say many, many thanks for the original concept, it’s bloody lovely.
Hello Ray
A good recipe should allow ‘cheating’.
Recipes are standing there waiting to be tweaked. They are organic and need to be stroked. Well done for posting your response. Sounds delicious 🙂
Hello Ali B
I haven’t tried it with different beans. I don’t think that they’d work so well with anything apart from Haricot/Navy (USA) beans.
This dish keeps well for two or three days in the fridge and freezes well.
They are very filling. Mike makes coleslaw to go with them – (bizarrely) it’s the perfect combination.
They are really, really good. But be careful not to overdose on them! We did and couldn’t eat them for months. Now we eat them about once a month. Heinz just doesn’t get a look in.
The recipe seems amazing and I can’t wait to try it I just had a few questions.
1)Has anyone tried in with different beans?
2)How long do they keep?
3)They sound very filling, so other than crusty bread would you suggest having them with anything else?
Thanks everyone for your help xxx
HI KarenO
I’m lucky as I visit different houses all the time and always I tend to find myself in the kitchen and I pick up tips. Often from people that have been cooking for 50 years or more.
Mike is young and is an American living in England. So his cooking is intriguing and eclectic.
Thank you for your encouragement re the blog, much appreciated. We’ve been blogging for over two years now so have lots of recipes on our site. Generally the rule is to blog about food every other day. So pleased that you are enjoying the site.
We use lots of baked beans – not Heinz yuck – but the cheapies from the supermarkets (Tesco low salt low sugar). We do eat them on toast although wouldn’t be my 1st choice, but mostly I wash them through & use them in soups & curries – they add a lovely texture & dimension to both. They have gone up so much this past year though from about 13p can to 29p can so I bought some oprganic haricot beans and boiled them up. They looked just like baked beans that had been washed through. They’re in the freezer and I grabbed the 1st handful for a curry last night straight from freezer to wok and it worked brilliantly. Saves tins, work & all that washing through a colander. Beans are so much cheaper this way that I was wondering how to make a good sauce if we did want beans on toast or some with bacon & egg and this post came up on the side under recent posts while I was looking at today’s post! Excellent – I’m so pleased. Thank you for sharing it with us. And thank you too for posting every day – occasionally I have to catch up on 2 or 3 posts as I haven’t been able to get to it so I don’t know how you have time every day but I know you have a wide and grateful ‘audience’ out here. So thank you Fiona. (& Danny)
Hello Sally
No I wouldn’t make any changes. Apparently they work well as vegetarian beans (obviously without the pork). You may need to add some salt but add this at the end as it can make the beans hard.
These beans are not bland like Heinz. They have far more zoompf.
I found this when I googled ‘traditional baked beans’. My three year old is allergic to any pig products and just a trace wipes her out for days. Would you make any changes to the recipe if leaving the pork out?
Recipe sounds brill!!! Just wondering if anyone knows how to get hold of bush’s baked beans here in the uk???
Hi Plumsource
Apparently this recipe is good without the salt pork. I didn’t believe this promise and tasted the sauce before I added the pork last night and it was very god indeed. nothing like our traditional beans, amazing.