Raise your hands if you don’t like baked beans. Nobody? I thought so.
This baked bean recipe has it all. It shines with the best beans you can buy but it is also great with plain Jane canned beans. (I used Rancho Gordo ayocote dry beans. Rancho Gordo Beans Site)It can be as sweet as you want it to be. Piquant savory flavors (tomato, garlic, onion) complement the sweet ingredients (molasses, apples, maple syrup). Did I mention that it incorporates two generous pours of bourbon whiskey–one pour for the beans and one for the cook?
As a testimony to the sheer goodness of baked beans, just about everyone claims a part in the creation of the dish. French cooks say American baked beans take their inspiration from French cassoulet. The Canadians say the dish is a Quebecois specialty. Historians say the Penebscot Indians, who baked their beans buried in hot ash in large holes in the ground, probably introduced baked beans to loggers working in the forests of Maine. Boston says the beans are theirs. Heinz started putting them in cans in 1901 and created a wildly-successful product.
Baked beans have infiltrated the cuisines of some pretty exotic places, too. I remember ordering a breakfast of baked beans on toast at the ground floor cafe in Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Hotel. It turns out the beans were the hotel’s culinary nod to Britain’s colonial role in the country. Baked beans were, after all, a part of the full English breakfast tradition–eggs, grilled tomato, hash browns, bacon, sausages, black pudding and baked beans. At the Taj, though, they were served with a side of mango chutney.
Whatever their provenance, baked beans, properly prepared, are a delicious addition to any menu.
This recipe is a meal in a bowl to be savoured on a cold winter evening, but the opportunities to pair it with other dishes are endless. (I served mine with a simple mayonnaise coleslaw spiced with caraway seeds.)
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Here is a link to the original recipe from which this recipe was adapted: Best Ever Vegan Baked Beans.
Excellent shot-lighting, exposure, styling, composition. I can almost taste them.
Made my day! Thank you.
Oh my gosh those sound so good, I’m off to get the ingredients today! ….we had the most delicious ribs last night I am imaging these bans withthoseribs, but I can see them with the coleslaw too….yummy on this cold day …..xx