Baked Beans (they should look like this when done, with all liquid absorbed/evaporated)
We’re pleased to have been featured in The Daily Meal’s roundup of 15 Best Baked Beans Recipes. With all the recipes on this site, “best” is quite a compliment. Any of the preps would be worth your time, actually, but we stand by ours because it’s, like we say, easy.
We’re probably going to serve these for our 4th of July barbecue, along with Better than KFC Cole Slaw and some Saratoga Chips. My town now has an excellent AYCE sushi place, Wasabi, that gives you a free meal on your birthday* so I’ll probably eat that for lunch and won’t be especially hungry come dinner time. Thus the main course will be good old hamburgers rather than a more ambitious Snow’s-style brisket.
There will also be a parade, and fireworks, and blistering heat. Have a good 4th of July BBQ and happy birthday to you (and me), America.
* There’s another regional spot that will give you one chicken wing for reach year of your age on your birthday but they’re closed on July 4, d’oh!
Happy Birthday Mr. Fourth of July. Enjoy the sushi meal and then dig into those baked beans. Sure look good. Do I see some pork bellies floating on top. Yum.
I printed your recipe. I am not used to purchasing canned beans. I always begin my bean dishes with dried beans. I will substitute small white beans or perhaps Great Northern Beans in your recipe. When I was in my twenties I experimented cooking dried beans for four years. I cooked every kind of dried bean I could find and tried different ways of preparing them until I felt I understood how to cook each kind of bean. Sometimes I combined beans. For example I like to cook black eyed peas with red kidney beans (3 cups of black eyes with one cup of red kidney).
My favorite bean to prepare is Great Northern. I can get lots of flavor depending on what I add to them pork, sausage, herbs and spices. Congrats on getting your recipe selected for the Best Of on that blog.
Enjoy a happy celebration of the anniversary of our country’s founding and your own birth.
There are a number of baked bean recipes on this site if you poke around, including those made with dried beans, and I agree Great Northern beans make a good base. The nice thing about this recipe is that it can be made at the last minute with supermarket beans that are often on sale for the 4th. Yesterday I used B&M bacon onion flavor which was $1 for a 20 oz can… can’t beat that.
And those pork bellies are in fact pieces of bacon, cut down to provide broader coverage in the dish.