So, we're gonna make a classic baked beans. This is a great dish. We're making use of red beans,
you can use kidney beans or pinto beans. But red beans are my favorite for this dish.
These beans I've soaked overnight in cold water,
and then I've cooked them in that same soaking liquid for about an hour and a half.
They're al dente and I've saved the cooking liquid, so I've drained them off, I have the cooking liquid. This is going to become part of our dish here....
Then, I have a bacon and onion that I'm going to cook down. Let me start doing that as we speak.
We're going to cook the bacon first to get a bit of color on it.....
And then we'll add the onion. We'll cook this all down until it's slightly caramelized
and that'll be part of the dish when we assemble it.
The next ingredients I have are Worcestershire, molasses, brown sugar, tomato paste, and Dijon mustard.
These five ingredients I'm going to combine in this pot and bring to a simmer.
So we're assembling our onion/bacon mixture,
our molasses mixture, and our bean mixture, and we're going to layer it in this nice Cazuela.
So.....
My beans are cooked al dente. I'm going to do a layer of this.....
And that will be the beginning of our building of the baked beans.
Take a look at our bacon. We're going to add our onions, here, in a minute. In the meantime, let me start our molasses base.
Teaspoon of Worcestershire,
quarter cup of molasses,
teaspoon of Dijon mustard,
2 tablespoons of tomato paste,
and three tablespoons of brown sugar.
Let's bring this mixture to a boil.
Taking a look at the bacon, I want to get it kind of a light brown before I add the onions.
So there's a molasses mixture.... I just want to come up to boil.
So our two components are almost ready.
We'll come right back to this and we'll add the onions.
Molasses mixture is ready, it's come to a boil. Our bacon's light brown. It's perfect time to add the onions.
So now, I want to cook this down until my onions are soft and they're translucent. This will be about three or four minutes.
So, these three components are precooked red beans, our molasses mixture, and our bacon and onions.
I'm going to layer them here and then, uh.....
So my bean cooking liquid, I'll add just to make sure its moist.....
And I'll pop this whole thing in the oven, 375 degrees for about one hour. We'll come right back.
Okay, so let's take a look at our bacon and onions. I think they're looking perfect.
Onions have cooked down, translucent, starting to caramelize....
And this is when we add the beer.
So we have an American Porter.... You can use Guinness or a other dark beer,
but what I want to do is that about a cup of beer to deglaze the bottom of the pan.....
Turn it up on high heat to evaporate the alcohol.
And now, all of our components are ready to layer the beans.
We have our first layer of beans.
And we're going to then go with our.....
Bacon/onion mixture.
So deglazing is a scraping all the particles off the bottom, all the good flavor....
And then let's go ahead and layer....
[Sound of metal spoon hitting pan]
The rest of our red bean layer.....
And then we'll drizzle our molasses, tomato paste syrup, over our baked beans.....
And here, at the end, we have some of our bean cooking liquid that we want to kind of just fill in, so that it's moist.
So the beans can continue cooking and absorbing some moisture.
So I have my oven preheated at 375 degrees. We're going to cover this with foil.
[Sound of aluminum foil]
We'll go ahead and bake this for an hour and bring it out of the oven, and see what it looks like.
This is just what they should look like.
They've absorbed all the moisture and they're ready to serve.
You can serve these beans with barbecued ribs, simple hamburger,
country fried chicken, or just on their own.