A Savory Baked Bean Recipe
This is a simple baked bean dish, with the beans first cooked in simmering water and then baked in a tomato sauce, flavored with bacon and sage, sweetened with honey, and spiced up with some chile flakes. You could also use pancetta in place of the bacon, or rosemary instead of sage. If you swap out molasses for the honey you’ll have something a lot closer to Boston baked beans.
How To Cook Tender Beans
I learned a useful bit of cooking information recently from reading Shirley Corriher’s CookWise, and that is that both sugar and calcium will keep beans from softening. Which is why if you are cooking with hard water, you may find your beans taking a lot longer than you might expect to cook to tenderness. Molasses and brown sugar contain calcium which is why you can cook a pot of baked beans with molasses all day and the beans still retain their shape. Sugar naturally occurs in tomatoes and in onions, so once the beans go in the sauce in the following recipe, they will take a long time to soften if they aren’t already cooked. Add the tomatoes or tomato sauce and the stock. Bring to a simmer. Taste for salt and add some if needed. Cover the pot and cook in a 325°F oven for 1 hour and 15 minutes. If still a bit wet, remove the cover and cook for 15 minutes more. Note that the cooking time will depend on several things, the most important being how thoroughly the beans were cooked to begin with when they were simmered. If the beans are still a bit hard when they go in the oven, it may take several hours to soften them, once the tomato and honey have been added. Serve either hot or at room temperature.
