The World Table

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Vermont · Side

Sugarhouse Baked Beans

  • Intermediate
  • 7 h
  • roughly 1 of 4 for cost

sweet-edged Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners.

Ingredients

  • 500g dried soldier or navy beans, soaked overnight
  • 150g salt pork, scored
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 180ml maple syrup
  • 2 tbsp brown sugar
  • 1 tbsp dry mustard
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 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

  1. Simmer the drained beans in fresh water 30 min until the skins split. Drain and keep the liquid. 30 min
  2. Layer the onion, beans, and salt pork in a bean pot.
  3. Mix the syrup, sugar, mustard, salt, and pepper into 500ml bean liquid and pour over the beans.
  4. Cover and bake at 130C for 6 hours, adding bean liquid whenever the surface looks dry. 360 min
  5. Uncover for the last 45 min to glaze. 45 min

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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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Sugarhouse Baked Beans Search YouTube: J. Kenji López-Alt on Sugarhouse Baked Beans A YouTube search for J. Kenji López-Alt and this dish. No affiliation.