BFIA baked beans with orange zest

bfia baked beans with orange zest adapted with great liberty from Hugh Acheson’s New Turn in the South . “This,” Acheson confesses, “makes me hunger for Boston more than bacon, but this is a killer baked bean recipe. So it is. A big beanpot.

• 2 cups navy or pinto beans soaked in cold water for 24 hours
• 2 cups pork stock if you have it, chicken stock if not ( but see the Notes)
• some ketchup ( see the Notes)
• 2 generous teaspoons dry mustard (like Colman’s)
• 2 Tablespoons molasses, sorghum or black treacle
• a minced onion
• heaped Tablespoon (or more) orange zest ( see the Notes)
• heaped teaspoon dried thyme
• generous jolt of Worcestershire
• enough sliced bacon to cover the beans in your pot.

1. Drain and rinse the beans, cover them “by 2 inches with cold water,” bring the beans to a roiling boil then simmer them until tender: That will take some time, usually more than an hour.

Preheat the oven to 300 °.

2. Drain the beans but save 1 cup of their liquor.
3. Dump the beans and liquor in a big ovenproof pot ( see the Notes) that has a cover and stir all the other ingredients but the bacon into the pot.
4. Cover the beans with the bacon, cover the pot and bake the beans for an hour, then ditch the lid and bake them for another hour.

Notes:

-Most recipes for baking beans call for far too little time in the oven and use too little liquid, so the beans do not become tender and retain an unpleasant tough texture. By preboiling the beans until tender, Acheson eliminates the problem.

-Acheson bakes his beans in le Creuset, apostate sacrilege. We use an earthenware beanpot and so should you. They do not cost much (the smallest fraction of the le C), look good on a shelf and bring you to step with the past.

-The ideal medium for baked beans is the leftover liquor from a New England boiled dinner, that is, corned beef simmered with aromatics and root vegetables, especially if you had laced the cooking liquid with Guinness or some good porter. Chill the stock, skim the fat and strain it. Always worth saving and it freezes well.

-The best Old School porter is from Fuller’s of Chiswick, sadly enough no longer independently owned but so far the quality appears to have held. Our current favorite from the craft movement; Shadow Figures brewed in the Hudson Valley by Common Roots.

-Ketchup adds an elusive note; the stuff from Heinz remains a benchmark product but if you have bottled some of Mrs. Lane’s green tomato and orange ketchup that would be even better.

-Acheson wisely suggests a microplane for zesting the orange peel.

-He also offers maple syrup as an alternative to sorghum but not molasses or treacle. Notwithstanding New England roots we do not much like the flavor of maple in baked beans. Molasses is traditional to New England, sorghum to the south and treacle to Britian. Steen’s cane syrup from Louisiana is the beguiling alternative to them all.

-The Acheson recipe calls for fresh thyme but we concur with Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, and Paul Prudhomme, that good quality dried thyme holds up better under long cooking like this.

-Acheson does not refer to pinto beans, omits the ketchup and Worcestershire, specifies two minced garlic cloves for our onion, and uses a lot less mustard and zest.