Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The musical fruit

Fall is coming and it's time to dig out the cooler weather recipes. One of my many cookbooks is one I got this past summer from America's Test Kitchen called The Cook's Illustrated Guide to Grilling and Barbecue. I've used it a lot over the past couple months.

One of the chapters is about side dishes to go with all that luscious meat. In that chapter is a recipe for Boston style baked beans, which while they go good with barbecue, the long baking time puts a lot of heat in a summer kitchen. It looked very intriguing in that they don't require you to soak the beans overnight first. (One of the things I like about America's Test Kitchen publications is that not only do they do a lot of experimenting to make the recipes come out right, they explain the results and why a test did or did not work. I'm always fascinated by how things work.)

So this simple recipe involved rendering some salt pork and bacon, softening an onion in that fat and then adding water, dry beans, molasses, brown mustard and salt. Nothing else. Bake for about 5-6 hours and voila! They came out very, very good. The only thing is... they were, shall we say, potent. Thank heavens I don't work in a tightly closed environment! While they were much less work than other recipes I've tried, I'm wondering if I should blend the recipe with another one I have that involves soaking in such a manner to turn down the volume of the music.

1 comment:

  1. For your birthday, you're getting a year's supply of Bean-O.

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