Next: quick and easy nutritional additions
Back to main
boston baked beans
Summer in New England often makes one think of cool treats, like ice cream and watermelon. Ironically it also makes me think of that quintessential potluck dinner staple: Boston Baked Beans.
A couple of weeks ago, browsing through the supermarket I came upon some soldier beans that inspired me to dust off my authentic stoneware bean pot and bake up a pot of comfort food.
This isn’t the most complex recipe, nor the most original, since it’s essentially that found on the back of Goya’s package of soldier beans. While you can use several different kinds of beans successfully in this recipe, soldier beans are traditional and they stand up the best to the cooking and resist turning to mush. You could probably use navy beans and maybe even red beans, but I don’t think I’d use black beans, if only just to avoid the blackness that would result.
Long slow cooking brings out the best flavors. Likewise, letting the beans sit overnight in the refrigerator and reheating the next day bring out some sublime flavors.
If you don’t have an authentic bean pot (which can be found online in several places), an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven or even a glass casserole with cover will work. You want something that will hold in the heat. But make sure to crack the lid just a little bit to let steam out to simulate the porousness of the bean pot.
Ingredients:
- 1-1/2 lbs. beans
- 1/2 lb salt pork
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 2/3 cup molasses
- 2 teaspoons dry mustard
- 1/2 teaspoon pepper
- salt to taste
- whole onion, quartered
Directions:
Rinse the bins in a strainer and pick out any stones or anything else that doesn’t look like it belongs. Soak the beans overnight in a large bowl, covered in water, with a tea towel over the bowl. Parboil the beans until the skins crack. Mix other ingredients, except onion, with 1 pint of boiling water. Put all ingredients in bean pot. Fill with water to brim. Bake at 300 degrees for six hours, watching the whole time. Keep filling with water so that it doesn’t dry out. Put bean pot on baking pan to catch overflow.
A Variation:
Now that makes a very nice pot of beans, but the very smart folks over at Cooks Illustrated magazine think they’ve found a better way and I’m willing to give them a try. They introduce a few changes to the standard recipe.
First, they trim the hard rind off the salt pork and cut it into 1/2-inch cubes. To that they add 2 slices of bacon cut into 1/4-inch pieces. They put them in a Dutch oven on the stove set over medium heat. (They don’t use a bean pot and you can’t put a stoneware pot on the stovetop; if I do this, I’ll render the pork in a skillet and transfer them with the drippings to the pot.) Cook the pork until it’s lightly browned and most of the fat is rendered, about 7 minutes. In this variation, they cut the onion into fine pieces. Put the onion in the pan with the pork and fat and keep cooking until soft, about another 8 minutes.
Here’s where I would diverge. At this point I would move everything to the bean pot and stash it in the oven, but in their recipe, you put the next ingredients in the Dutch oven, bring it to a boil, and then move it to the oven. What you add is the molasses, 1-1/2 tablespoons of brown mustard instead of the dry mustard, 1-1/4 teaspoons of salt, and 9 cups of water. (In the bean pot, I would fill with water to cover and keep checking to add more water as it cooked until I reached 9 cups total.)
Notice a big difference? Yes, they didn’t soak the beans overnight! In fact, the CI folks say that they’ve tested beans in different applications using both methods and there’s just no reason to soak them overnight, if you’re going to be cooking them for hours in the oven anyway. Sounds good to me, especially because I don’t have to remember to soak the beans the night before. Oh, the other difference is that they use small white beans (it’s literally what the package says in the supermarket), but I don’t think it matters if you use soldier beans.
Anyway, the cook the beans for about 4 hours, stirring once halfway through, then remove the lid and continue baking until the liquid gets syrupy, maybe another 1 to 1-/2 hours.
Another great touch is that at the end, after they’ve taken the beans out of the oven, they stir in another tablespoon of molasses, a teaspoon of cider vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste. What a great idea to kick up the flavor. In fact after our recent batch of beans, Melanie and I both agreed that the original recipe needed more molasses flavor.
Next time, we’ll try it the CI way and we’ll let you know how it works out.
COMMENTS
John, as you say, it is subjective, but I don’t think it’s all that sweet, especially once you add the vinegar and mustard. The molasses gives it more richness than sweetness. I would says it’s less sweet than canned beans.
Posted by Domenico Bettinelli on 07/18/06 at 06:25 PMCommenting is not available in this weblog entry.
Comments are being moderated. After you submit your comment it could take up to a couple hours, but usually only a few minutes, before it will appear. Thank you for your patience. If you have any questions, you may contact Domenico Bettinelli.