Baked Beans Recipes

Here are a couple of Baked Bean recipes I'm considering trying. Both use fruit with the beans. One uses Pineapples and the other uses Apple Pie filling.

Beans, Baked, Keri's Hog-Apple Baked Beans

INGREDIENTS:
3-4 Slices Bacon, diced
2 16 Oz Can Pork and beans, mostly drained (modified to 2 28-oz cans Bush's Baked Beans - see note below)
1/2 cup Blues Hog BBQ Sauce (or other sweet-spicy favorite)
1 lb smoked leftover smoked pork or beef, more or less, or 1 lb crumbled cooked pork sausage
1 Can Apple pie filling
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 green pepper, chopped
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 Tbs Worcestershire sauce
2 Tbs Mustard (prepared)
1 tsp chipotle or cayenne powder (optional, to taste*)
1 tsp Blues Hog barbecue rub (or your favorite de jour)


Procedure:
1 Brown bacon, and saute onion and green pepper in bacon grease. Mix in remaining ingredients. Bake at 325º for 1 hour, or simmer on stovetop in large pot for 30 minutes if you don't have time to do them in the oven. Serves 12.
2 This recipe began life as APPLE PIE BAKED BEANS from somewhere on the web, but I think I've made enough changes to it now to claim it as my own. This is my standard for baked beans anymore.
3 *This is a rather spicy recipe due to the chipotle/cayenne powder. Feel free to leave it out if you'll be feeding those who prefer a less spicy taste.
4 Keri C, smokin' on Tulsa Time
5 09/18/07-----Add all the goo from the pie filling. The beans get a rinse.

courtesy of Keri C & ~thirdeye~

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DUTCH'S WICKED BAKED BEANS
(Beans that will even make Chili Heads happy)

6-8 strips of bacon cut into 1/2 inch squares
1/2 Medium onion, diced
1/2 Bell pepper, diced
1 - 2 Jalapeño Peppers, diced (seeding is optional)
1 - 55 ounce can Bush’s Baked Beans
1-8 ounce can of pineapple chunks, drained
1 Cup Brown Sugar, packed
1 Cup ketchup
1/2 - 1 Tbs. dry (ground) mustard

Sauté bacon pieces in fry pan until crispy and remove from pan with a slotted spoon. Sauté onion, bell pepper and jalapeño pepper until tender.

In a large mixing bowl combine beans, pineapple, brown sugar, ketchup and dry mustard. Stir in bacon pieces and vegetables. Pour into a 12X9 or a deep 9X9 aluminum baking pan. (While mixing if things look dry, add additional ketchup 1/4 -1/2 cup at a time)

Place in a 220-250° smoker for 2 1/2 – 3 hours (make sure temperature of the baked beans reaches 160° ) or place in a 350° oven and bake for 1 hour.

NOTE: If you are making these beans as a side dish for Kansas City style pork ribs, smoke the removed skirt meat for 1-1 1/2 hours, then dice the skirt meat and stir into the Baked Beans.

DISCLAIMER

With the Jalapeño pepper and the dry mustard these beans have the potential for some MAJOR heat. CAUTION should be exercised when feeding these beans to small children and/or the elderly.

To make this recipe Family Friendly, omit the Jalapeño pepper and the dry mustard.

How I Do Brisket

I try to get a nice big whole brisket (sometimes called Packer's cut) that has the Flat & the Point. Sometimes I can only get the Flat. As for brisket (well all BBQ really), the key is monitoring your temperature.

You may want to check your cooker's thermometer to make sure its reading the right temp. To do that, remove the thermometer and put it in some boiling water. It should read 212 F or close to it.

Then you want to get a meat thermometer. Get the kind that you can leave in the meat or better yet get a digital one.

For my rub, I used about:

1/2 cup of paprika
1/2 cup of brown sugar or Turbanado
2 Tbsp of sea salt
2 Tbsp of pepper
1 Tbsp of cayenne (optional)
1 Tbsp of garlic powder
1 Tbsp of onion powder

Making your own rub is pretty easy. I tend to use Paprika and Brown Sugar/Turbanado for the base of my rub then add other spices depending on my mood.

Put most of the rub on both sides of the brisket. Then wrap it up in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge overnight.

Take out the Brisket and let it sit out about 30-60 minutes. While its sitting out, I'll sprinkle some more rub on it. I'll also get my smoker to temperature.

Once the smoker is at 225F-250F, I'll throw in my wood chunks and let them get going. The key here is to make sure the smoke coming out of your smoker is a nice thin blue color. You don't want thick rolling clouds, because that will give you meat a bitter taste. A BBQ cookbook I read states it perfectly, you just want the smoke to kiss the meat. Once the smoke is a nice thin blue color, put your meat in the smoker.

Smoke is just another spice for your meat. I usually use Hickory because I like that flavor but it can be strong. Mesquite is another pretty popular strong flavor. Apple and Pecan are a bit milder taste. I tend to use wood chunks in the first half of the cook. My first couple of smokes I probably used too much chunk. You just have to experiment here and figure out how much smoke flavor you want in your meat.

Once the meat is in the smoker I'll make a mop. I use a spray bottle to apply my mop.

Mop:

1 cup of Apple Juice
1/2 a Beer (or whiskey is a good substitute)
1-2 Tbsp of your rub
a couple of garlic cloves
half of medium onion
some EVOO

I'll get the EVOO warmed up and saute the onion and the garlic cloves and get the onion clear. Then add your rub and let it infuse with the oil. Then add the juice and beer and let it simmer for a bit.

Then strain it all out and put in your spray bottle (or you can use one of those little mop things).

I apply the mop about once an hour.

Cook the brisket to 165F degrees. Then wrap it in foil and pour some of your mop in with the foil. Then you can either put it back in your smoker or move it to an oven that's at 250F degrees.

If you want to slice your brisket, cook it to 185F degrees. If you want to pull your brisket, cook it to 200F degrees. I usually slice my brisket. Take it out of the cooker and put it in a cooler and put some towels on top of it. It will still be cooking. You can leave it there for 1-3 hours and it will still be hot.

If you got the Packer's cut ( with the Flat & the Point ), what you do is is when you remove it it, separate the Flat from the Point (there's a layer of fat between the two). Then cut the Point up into a little 1 inch x 1 inch cubes and put them in a disposable roasting pan, add some BBQ sauce,rub, and mop and put it back on your smoker and let it go for another hour or two. Maybe add a chunk. In Kansas City, this is known as Burnt Ends and is considered a BBQ delicacy.

For the flat, I usually slice mine as thin as I can. Then you can either just eat the slices or put it on a sandwich or whatever. Leftover brisket makes a mean chili. Also if your brisket is really tough, cooking it in chili might help tenderize it. I've also done fajitas with left over brisket. I love the stuff.

Another Cook on the Big Green Egg

I cooked Emeril's Oven Fried Cheesy Chicken on the Big Green Egg tonight. Stephanie hates Blue Cheese, so we substituted in a cheddar and mozzarella mix. It was really good.

I learned a pretty major lesson that will help my cooking on the egg. The Dome gets hotter than the grill, when using the PlateSetter (the stone plate that allows for indirect heat). The dome was showing 425 but the grill was only at 350. I'm really looking forward to doing Pork Butt & Brisket on the egg.

Here's some pictures of my last Pork Butt & Brisket:






Yea, I'm really looking forward to smoking something on the Egg. This weekend I'm planning on doing some Country Style Ribs.

Learning Curve on the Big Green Egg

Well cooking on the Egg has a bit of a learning curve. I over cooked my filets. I was shooting for Medium doneness and got Medium-Well and Well Done steaks. I seared them in a cast iron skillet for 2.5 minutes per side and cooked them at 450 in the Egg but I let them go just a little too long.

For Easter, instead of Prime Rib, we decided to do Stuffed Beef Tenderloin, using a recipe Stephanie learned when she got her culinary degree. The stuffing was mushrooms, bacon, garlic and onion and parsley. I couldn't find a whole beef tenderloin. but I did find some that were cut in half, so I bought two of them.

You put the bacon, onion and garlic in the food processor and get it finely chopped then throw it in a skillet. Then while thats cooking, cut the caps off the mushrooms and put them in the food processor and chop them up nicely. Then add the mushrooms and the parsley to the bacon mixture and cook until all the moisture from the mushrooms has evaporated. Set aside and chill.

Once its chilled, you can butterfly the tenderloin and spread the mushroom mixture. You are then supposed to tie the tenderloin with butcher's twine. We couldn't find butcher's twine at Walmart so we did the next best thing, we wrapped the tenderloin with bacon.

I heated the egg to about 450 degrees and then threw in a bunch of wood chips from Jack Daniel's Oak Aging Barrels for some smoky flavor. I put the tenderloins on the egg to cook them until they were medium in the middle. One of my thermometers wasn't working right and it was registering medium but they were really rare. So I put them back on for about 15 more minutes and they turned out really good.

I also threw some asparagus on the grill too while the tenderloin was finishing up. Stephanie made loaded mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, chocolate eclair cake and banana pudding to go with it. We had a great Easter feast.

My new Large Big Green Egg

I got a new grill last summer. It was a Charbroil Tec Series that included an infrared burner. Well there were some engineering design issues with the infrared burner and the screws holding the burner in place actually melted. After doing some research I found this was a pretty common occurrence with these grills. I contacted Lowes and they said they'd take it back even though it was about 6 months old.

So I returned it at the end of February. In the meantime, I've been using my Brinkmann Smoke N Pit to do slow smoked BBQ. In the last 2 months I've done brisket, pork butt, sausage, chuck roast, stuffed jalapeno poppers, and chicken. I have fallen in love with cooking low & slow.

Well last night, we went and picked up a Large Big Green Egg. It's a ceramic cooker based on the Japanese kamodo. It uses lump charcoal rather than gas. Since it's made from a really heavy ceramic (it was 150 lbs), it is extremely efficient at holding heat. What sold me on it is the fact you can do low & slow cooking on it and it will go 20-30 hours on one load of charcoal. Not only that but it can easily get to 700 degrees for doing sears on steaks. Some guys have claimed to get it up to 1500 degrees but that's pretty scary to me.

I'm putting it together tomorrow evening. And Saturday, for my wife's birthday, I'll christen it with some filet mignon. On Easter, I'm going to do a low & slow Prime Rib with some wood chunks that came from an oak barrel used to make Jack Daniels. I'm pretty excited.

For the filet mignon, I'm planning on roasting a whole garlic and then making a paste out of it. Then I'll add some EVOO, sea salt, and pepper and just lather it over the filet. I'm going to get the temperature to about 500-600 degrees and sear it up real good and cook it to medium.

For the Prime Rib, I'm going to cut little slits all over it and stuff garlic cloves into it. I'll then make a simple rub with sea salt, black pepper, and rosemary. Add a little EVOO and put a nice coating on the Prime Rib. I'm going to get the Egg to about 250 degrees. While I'm doing that I'll get a nice sear on a pan over the stove. I'll then cook it on the smoker until it reaches 135 degrees internally (about medium rare). I'll then take it off and wrap it in foil and put it in a cooler for about 30 minutes. This will be my first Prime Rib, so I hope I don't screw it up.

I'll post pictures later.