This sylvester eve 2014, we had a good meal, and a friend of mine made brisket. To accompany that, I decided that it was time to do some baked beans again. I love them, but I don’t make them quite often enough.

So, to start, I had to make sure that we had the ingredients. I decided to go with a serving for 12. If there are leftovers, I put them in the freezer. The choice for the baked beans was quite meaty, which I will not do again next time, but ok. It was very tasteful, nevertheless.

900 grams of white beans in tomato sauce

500 grams of ground beef

2 large onions chopped

1 green bell pepper chopped

1/2 a cup of brown sugar

1/2 a cup of ketchup (or catsup according to the original recipe)

2 cups of sweet chili sauce

2 tablespoons of regular mustard

250 grams of diced bacon

250 grams of ham

First of all, I started out with heating the pan and browning the ground beef. Once nicely and evenly browned, I removed the beef from the pan and drained of the grease. Now, I put in the bacon and let it get brown too.

Once the bacon is brown again, I added the onion and the bell pepper to the mixture.

Stir until the onions are nice and soft. After that I removed some coals from under the pan, to reduce the heat and added back the ground beef. Keep stirring and add the brown sugar, ketchup, chili sauce and mustard. Let it simmer for about 15 minutes and add the beans and the ham.

Now, close the lid and add about 14 coals to the lid and let it go for 2 hours. I personally did it for about 1.5 hours and placed the pan into the WSM which was doing the brisket at the time. I’ve added some woodchucks for some smokey flavour. (cherry was our choice).

I had to stir it every 30 minutes to get the flavours of the smoke in, but it was worth it.

The combination below was fantastic, although next time, I will make a less meaty version of the baked beans and probably will not place it in the WSM for so long. I reduced the moist in the baked beans quite a lot, but still loved it!

Happy 2015 everybody!