You know how it is when you just plain crave baked beans.
This rich baked beans recipe will satisfy your cravings and throws in healthy sweet potatoes to boot.
And, then there is the complex smoky flavor of chipotle peppers. What’s not to love here?
Chipotles, by the way, are simply smoked and dried jalapeños. That was news to me. Apparently, this preparation technique dates back to the Aztecs who learned that smoking the peppers (like over a fire, people!) overcame the tendency of the thick-skinned jalapeños to rot when using normal drying methods. The resulting smoked chipotle peppers were then used in complicated ceremonial meals. A 1571 journal, for example, described the preparation of a sauce that made liberal use of chipotle chiles. The sauce contained a mixture of chiles, tomatoes, nuts, pumpkin seeds, spices, chocolate and cornmeal. Yum! Sounds very much like a recipe for modern-day mole. (Etiquette at Aztec galas was pretty interesting, too. It was traditional before an Aztec meal was served to offer guests flowers which they were expected to rub on their heads, hands and necks after which each guest would drop a little food on the floor as an offering to the god Tlaltecuhtli.)
Fortunately for us all, chipotles continue to be a popular ingredient in a number of spicy foods and, for some gourmands, the pepper is considered a delicacy to be savored. The Austin Sun Newspaper, for example, printed an adoring piece about chipotles in which they described the pepper using much the same terminology that wine connoisseurs use to describe a fine wine: “The taste profile is smoky and sweet, exhibiting subtle tobacco and chocolate flavors with a Brazil nut finish, with deep, complex heat; the piquancy is rounded and slowly fading.” I don’t know about you, but I think that’s funny. Then again, I find the pretentious wine notes that appear on wine bottles pretty funny, too.
Today, chipotles are often sold packed in a tomato-vinegar-spice sauce called adobo, but you also can find them au naturel (see below).
This recipe is based on one of Martha Rose Shulman’s recipes from the New York Times. I’ve sweetened it up with extra honey and molasses, added a couple extra onions and switched out the red beans for Rancho Gordo’s Marcella beans–something I’ve been doing a lot lately in bean dishes. To say that I’m hooked on Marcellas is a vast understatement. Marcellas are the Tesla of white beans in my book.
Oh, by the way…if you are invited to my next party, I plan to have my guests rub their heads with flowers Aztec-style. Sounds like a great ice-breaker. We’ll also drop some food on the floor for Tlaltecuhtli Juliet, Blue Cayenne’s Chief Quality Officer.
Save RecipeIngredients
- 1 pound Marcella beans (or red beans, pintos or San Franciscano beans) washed, picked over and soaked overnight in 2 quarts of water
- 1 bay leaf
- 2 T. extra virgin olive oil
- 1 red onion (chopped)
- 2 yellow onions (quartered)
- Salt to taste
- 4 garlic cloves (to taste) minced
- 1/4 C tomato paste
- 1/4 C. honey
- 1/4 C. molasses
- 2 chipotles in adobo (seeded and minced)
- 2 large sweet potatoes (peeled and cut into a large dice)
- Chopped fresh parsley for garnish
Instructions
- Rinse dry beans and put into 2 quarts of water to soak overnight. On the next day, add a bay leaf to the soaking water and bring beans to a slow boil over medium head. Reduce the heat of low and cover and simmer for one hour or until the beans are tender. Beans need to be kept submerged and you can add extra water if you need to do so. Be sure not to overcook the beans. You want them to keep their shape in your baked bean dish. Remove and discard the bay leaf when your beans have finished cooking.
- Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.
- Heat one tablespoon of the oil in a large pan and sauté the chopped onion until tender. This will take about 5 minutes. Add a generous amount of salt and the minced garlic to the pan and continue to cook until the garlic is fragrant--about 30 seconds. Add chopped sautéed onion, raw quartered onions and garlic to the beans. Add salt to taste, tomato paste, honey, molasses and chipotles. Stir well. Bake (covered) until the beans are soft but not falling apart and the cooking liquid has boiled down to form a thick, sweet sauce. This will take several hours. If your beans have too much liquid, you can take the cover off the pan and continue to bake in the oven until the liquid is reduced to the thickness you want.
- While the beans are baking, drizzle the remaining tablespoon of olive oil over the diced sweet potatoes. Put into a shallow baking pan and roast at 375 degrees F. for about 25-30 minutes. When the sweet potatoes are baked through and soft, stir them into the baking beans about half an hour before the beans are finished baking. You want the sweet potatoes to absorb some of the delicious baked bean sauce. Alternatively, you could add the raw sweet potatoes to the baking beans earlier in the baking process. I found that my sweet potatoes were overdone and mushy when baked this way. For that reason, I opted to roast them separately and add them in at the end.
- Serve baked beans garnished with chopped fresh parsley.
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Here is a link to the original Martha Rose Shulman recipe from which this recipe was adapted: NYT: Baked Beans with Sweet Potatoes and Chipotles.
