Homemade BBQ Beans

So I had planned to do another Cooking With Monsters and make Homemade BBQ Beans over a wood fire in the dutch oven outside and get A-Bomb and the Terminator to help me. But the reliable British weather saw fit deluge the country the entire weekend and I wasn’t that motivated. So instead we have GymCee cooks beans in the warm and dry.

I did a fair bit of research online into baked and bbq beans recipes, mostly American in origin and mostly very very sweet sounding. So in the end I decided to cook as I so often do by general instinct with the idea of recipe informing my decisions.

Recipe

Normally tinned baked beans are made with white haricot beans I believe. I had trouble finding these so whilst on holiday so I picked up some dried cannellini beans from the covered market in Abergavenny. The recipes I’d read normally call for molasses and vinegar and salt pork. But reading the quantities scared me as it sound very sweet and sharp. So instead I’ve used a small amount of honey from our own hives and some smoked streaky bacon. I got the bacon from Rawling Family Butchers in Abergavenny and was lucky enough to get an inch thick slice of smoked whole side of streaky bacon.

Cooking the baked beans

I started by soaking my beans in fresh water for about 8 hours. I then drain and par boiled on a low simmer for about an hour but stopped before the beans were fully cooked.

I heated a large cast iron casserole on a medium heat added a neutral vegetable oil and fried on my streaky bacon in inch sized chunks. I’m not sure of the absolute quantities but I’m guessing 200-300 grams if not a little higher. Once this had taken on some nice colour I removed them from the plan.

Next I finely diced half a large onion and fried off gently in a little neutral cooking oil with two crushed cloves of garlic. Once soft I reintroduced the bacon, added a 600 gram packet of passata. Two generous tablespoons of our own honey and about a pint of homemade chicken stock. I added the beans to the pan stirred gently put on the lid and placed in an oven at 120° C.

I let this cook for about four hours, stirring gently from time t o time and adding water as necessary to stop it drying out.

Results

The final result was excellent, the beans have some real body to them. The flavours have become more complex and mixed beautifully . Simple tomato passata is transformed by the slow cooking into a velvety sauce. The bacon has slow cooked to the point it falls apart. The whole dish has added the sweetness of the sauce to the salty smokiness of the bacon.

Served with some crusty bread a very satisfying winter meal. One of my regrets here which betrays my relative inexperience as a blogger is that I forgot to take a from the oven photo as I was too busy scoffing it all.

I’ll be sticking other links to similar posts here.