Baked Beans

Recipe: Baked Beans

Page: HTCE p. 416

Rating: ***

I've made these twice, now, and both times the beans weren't quite as soft as I wanted them to be. I've read that homemade baked beans are frequently not as mushy, but I think mine could have been softer. The flavor was *** when prepared exactly as written. I made a few changes the second time around and definitely upped the flavor component to ****. I think there are some tricks, here, if you want to make homemade beans that taste like the canned/restaurant variety:

1. cook your beans until almost as soft as you want them before baking them with the seasonings and/or plan to bake them a while. They will soften in the oven, but it could take hours.
2. Plan to bake them several hours--the seasonings just get better and better that way.
3. They'll reheat fine, so you may want to make these the day before serving and leave them a touch runnier than you need (they'll get drier as they sit). Then, you can be sure they're as tender as you want and you can just reheat the day you need them.
4. You won't need 8-oz of bacon. I used about 1/3 of a pound or so and chopped it. I sauteed the onion with the bacon and poured the whole mess into the bean pot :).
5. I also added 1/4 cup of brown sugar, reduced the mustard to one teaspoon (ground), and added 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce (mentioned in the "Ideas for Baked Beans" part). I tasted them as they cooked and made sure there was enough salt once the bacon flavor had permeated (I didn't want to oversalt accidentally since bacon is pretty salty).

I recommend trying them. I'll try them again for sure. It's just one of those recipes that will take some practice/tweaking since everyone has different ideas of what the best baked beans taste like. They're much cheaper than canned and do taste better overall. They're also quite easy; they just take a bit of time to cook.