Massachusetts · Side
Boston Baked Beans
- Intermediate
- 7 h 30 m
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners.
Ingredients
- 500g dried navy beans, soaked overnight
- 200g salt pork, scored
- 1 onion, whole
- 180ml molasses
- 3 tbsp brown sugar
- 1 tbsp dry mustard
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp black pepper
The skills inside
Soaking dried goods back to life
Allergen screen
Found: mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer the drained beans in fresh water 30 min until the skins curl back when you blow on them. Drain and save the liquid. 30 min
- Set the onion in the base of a bean pot, add beans, and bury the salt pork with the rind standing proud.
- Whisk molasses, sugar, mustard, salt, and pepper into 600ml of the bean liquid and pour in.
- Cover and bake at 130C for 6-7 hours, topping up with bean liquid every hour so they never dry out. 420 min
- Uncover the last hour to darken the top and crisp the pork rind.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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