Like many in the UK, I enjoy beans on toast for breakfast or lunch when I need something in a rush. Cheap, convenient and filling, baked beans are full of protein, fibre, calcium and potassium whilst being low fat and are even one of your five-a-day. This week, while preparing baked beans for breakfast, I opted to add a dash of one sauce, and it significantly altered the flavour, which pleasantly surprised me.
I’ve been experimenting with different methods to enhance the flavour of my baked beans, and recently discovered that incorporating smoked paprika adds a lovely smokiness you would normally get with bacon. However, this time around, I added Worcestershire sauce, which Chef Carol recommends adding in her recipe on her food blog, From a Chef’s Kitchen. The cooking pro claimed that adding Worchestershire sauce is an easy and delicious way to make canned beans “extraordinary” and “taste like you made them from scratch”.
Worcestershire sauce is a fantastic kitchen-sink condiment for building layers of flavour in savoury dishes, especially beans.
The sauce adds a great deal of depth thanks to the umami notes of anchovy and tamarind.
I preferred the flavour that the Worcestershire sauce gave the baked beans more than the smoked paprika – it makes the beans tastier and the sauce richer.
As usual, I emptied one of those small cans of baked beans into a pot and allowed them to simmer over medium heat for about five minutes with a teaspoon of butter.
After, I stirred in a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce and left the beans to simmer for a further two minutes.
A tablespoon was perfect because it did not overpower the baked beans, but added a little bit of an umami flavour to them.
Baked beans are quite sweet, so I appreciated the more salty and savoury addition of the soy sauce. After the two minutes, I turned the heat off, and it was time to add the baked beans to my toast.
After trying several ways to enjoy my baked beans, I can safely say that this is one of my favourites, and I will probably add soy sauce to it again, especially considering I always have a bottle of it in my kitchen.
Similarly, soy sauce is said to have similar effects when added to baked beans, giving them a salty and tangy touch that would otherwise be missing.