There’s a way to make canned baked beans taste delicious and homemade and it involves adding just a few ingredients, including one you probably wouldn’t expect. Baked beans are such a staple in British cupboards. They are cost-effective and a super handy thing to have to make a quick lunch or breakfast at home. Many people enjoy baked beans as they come, in the sweet tomato sauce in the tin, but others add extra ingredients to their beans.
Common additions might be chilli powder, paprika, pepper and even cheese. Others even add things like soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce. But there is one unexpected ingredient you probably don’t realise can make your baked beans taste amazing. When it is added with two other things, it can make a tin of baked beans taste like something you have made at home from scratch.
Rachel Ballard at Feast and Farm has shared their baked beans recipe that simply uses a tin of baked beans and a few other ingredients to make a stand-out dish. For this, she use two cans of baked beans, yellow mustard, ketchup and the unexpected ingredient of brown sugar.
To prepare this, she doesn’t use a stovetop. Rather, she baked the beans. “You can use any oven-proof dish you like and mix your canned baked beans, mustard, ketchup and brown sugar right in there,” she explains.
“Then bake until they are hot all the way through and bubbling around the edges. As they cook the baked beans will thicken and get a little sticky crust around the edges–that makes them look like they’ve had ages in the oven doing their thing.”
She says that you can also cook them in a pot this way, but it is “not as good”. She explains that doing it this way means that you won’t get “the slow-cooked look or flavour the beans take on when they dry out and caramelise a bit in the oven”.
“And you can’t add bacon to the top when you cook them stovetop. I think the flavor is still basically the same though, so if you’re pressed for time it will work.
“But if you have time, do give them 20 minutes in the oven and it will be worth it.”