Side dishes are easy to take shortcuts. Bagged salad, pre-cut veggies, or even a can of baked beans are fine. Especially when your main dish is amazing. But when there’s extra attention paid to that side dish or salad, guests will really talk about your skills. Maple Bacon Baked Beans takes some time and planning, but are any easy add to those long, slow cooks.
Prepping Your Beans
We’ve gone with soaking Great Northern beans overnight to prepare them for cooking. There are other methods to quicken the hydration, including some initial simmering to get the dried beans prepped. You can use canned beans. However, cooking time in the dutch oven will be significantly lowered using canned beans, so we can’t vouch for the results there. And simply covering the dried beans in water overnight is easy enough.
Cast Iron on the Grill
For this version of Maple Bacon Baked Beans, we’re working with a cast iron Lodge Dutch Oven to go on the charcoal grill. No smoking today, just a low-temp cook. Over the summer, we’ll try a couple of different treatments; gas vs. charcoal, different types of beans, and messing with the spices and seasonings. This core recipe will be the starting point, with riffs on that plan to use what we have available and what we’re eating it with.
Full disclosure, we did this cook as a stand-alone, not specifically along with one of our low, slow cooks. Part of that was playing with the new iKamand for the Kamado Joe on a low-risk cook. This automatic, WIFI-controlled thermometer and fan promises to take some of the variability out of the temps on the charcoal grill. But a pot of beans seemed a better experiment than an expensive slab of meat.
Ingredient Prep
We used leftover strips of bacon, both maple-flavored and uncured, and the onions and the peppers we had laying around. And with one of the bags of dried beans we had stocked up on, this is a low-effort side that can work with everything from chicken, to burgers and brats, to steak. The Maple Bacon Moonshine (www.sugarlands.com) brings some additional sweetness. An option would be to use .25 cup of Molasses, for a more traditional, darker finish.
Set and Forget
We simply heated the bacon, onion, and jalapenos in the hot Dutch Oven on the grill for about six minutes to render out some fat and soften the onion. Next, we added the rest of the ingredients and the drained beans and cooked, covered, for six hours. At that point, the bottom was beginning to char and would have needed extra liquid to cook any longer. Next time, we’d just trust it to cook without extra checking and stirring, probably every two hours or so. The beans would stay together a little more.
In these proportions, the Maple Bacon Baked Beans are still a little sweet, and can take a little more heat through jalapenos or cayenne if you prefer more spice. But if you’ve got some space on the grill to put the Dutch Oven while you’re cooking something else, this is a low-effort, high-reward side dish.
| This recipe is part of our 4th of July Celebration |
Maple Bacon Baked Beans
Equipment
- Dutch Oven
Ingredients
- 1 lb Great Northern Beans dried
- 1 Yellow Onion diced
- 2 Jalapeno diced
- 1 lb Bacon diced
- .25 cup Tomato Paste
- .25 cup Maple Syrup
- .25 cup Brown Sugar
- .25 cup Maple Bacon Moonshine Optional
- 3 cups Vegetable Stock
- 1.5 tsp Salt
- 1 tsp Black Pepper
- .5 tsp Cayenne Pepper
Instructions
- Soak dried beans overnight (about 8 hours) to hydrate in 4-6 cups water
- Drain beans, retaining about 1 cup of water to add to vegetable stock (4 cups total liquid)
- Chop bacon, onion, and jalapeno.
- Set grill or oven to 250 degrees. Heat cast iron Dutch Oven either on grill or on stovetop. Add bacon, onion, and jalapeno to hot Dutch Oven for five to six minutes to start rendering bacon fat and start cooking down onion.
- Add tomato paste, maple syrup, brown sugar and optional Maple Bacon Moonshine to Dutch oven. Then add drained beans, vegetable stock (with bean water), and stir.
- Stir in pepper, salt, and cayenne. Cover and put in oven or grill at 250. Cook for six to eight hours, covered. Most liquid will cook off over that time.
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