Home Made Baked Beans

A few weekends ago for lunch Mr VST and I had baked beans on toast. The toast was my home made real bread that had been toasted. The baked beans were my usual supermarket value brand. Baked beans are one of those things that people seem to like a particular brand of and I was brought up on these and have always defended them against other brands. Anyway on top of my real bread toast they suddenly seemed a bit pale, too sweet and the sauce too gooey so I decided to make my own. 

The starting point was trying to find some haricot beans. There were none in the supermarket or the wonderful 'Continental Stores' and I happened on some in a fantastic independent health food shop last weekend. I soaked the dried beans overnight and then boiled them, I wish I'd boiled them for a bit longer. Anyway, I had a recipe in a recipe book, which was very simple, just beans, water, cider vinegar, tomato purée and molasses.

I found  a few other recipes online that inspired me, there was one from Tana Ramsey and another by Angela Boggiano. In the end, with 500g of beans, I put in one finely chopped onion, a clove of garlic, minced, a tablespoon of soy sauce, two teaspoons of paprika, one tablespoon of dark molasses sugar, a tablespoon each of olive oil and cider vinegar, three of tomato purée, a can of chopped tomatoes, a teaspoon of cumin and quarter of a teaspoon of mild chilli powder. 

As directed in the original recipe book I then put all of these in a pot in the oven at 110 degrees Celcius for four hours.  

 I thought that the beans would cook some more in the oven but unfortunately they didn't. This meant that when they came out they were still a bit undercooked for my liking and so needed boiling again, which I think was what destroyed all the flavour (boo hoo). We tested them out in the way baked beans should be, on toast and a jacket potato. 

With the remaining beans I boiled them up and then added some more soy sauce, cumin, molasses sugar and paprika. I had them for lunch the next day and they were great!