5 January 2022
Recipe from Sous Vide for Everybody, America's Test Kitchen, 2018, p. 170. Recipe also available online.
In the book I used for this recipe the title is "Boston not-baked beans". Sous vide is used most commonly to cook meat. The constant temperature water bath gives great control over how done the meat is. Unlike cooking in the oven or stove top you can't overcook a steak or a roast when you cook them in a constant temperature water bath. It will be interesting to see how this works with baked beans.
The cooking process takes several days, but very little of that is hands on. A pound of dried small white beans was soaked in a brine at room temperature for 24 hours. (The recipe specifies dried navy beans, but neither of the two supermarkets that I checked had them.) While the hot water bath heated to 194° the beans were drained and rinsed to remove excess salt. Water, molasses, dark brown sugar, soy sauce, dry mustard, and black pepper were whisked together in a bowl. Salt pork, cut into ½-inch pieces, was rendered in a Dutch oven. A diced onion was added and cooked until soft. The molasses mixture was added and brought to a simmer. Baking soda was added and cooked until the foaming subsided. The beans were put into a vacuum bag, which allowed the bag to stand on its own. The molasses mixture was carefully poured in, a bay leaf added, the bag was sealed and the air was pumped out. This was placed in the 194° hot water bath for 21 hours. To finish, the bean mixture was poured into a Dutch oven and cooked for about 10 minutes to thicken the sauce. Total time was about 45 hours, but the hands-on time was about 1 hour.
If you are a fan of Boston baked beans this is a good way to prepare them. The beans were tender and firm, they were not mushy and were intact. Cooking them sous vide was much simpler to do than baking them for a lengthy stint in the oven with much easier clean up. I don't bake beans very often but when I do this is likely to be the method I would use.
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