Once upon a time, I was a Cost Engineer at the giant engineering and construction firm Fluor Corporation, and the project I was working on hit a lull lasting several days wherein the entire cost team, about six of us, had absolutely nothing to do. So we created a two-day project for ourselves: add up all the phone numbers in the Fluor phone directory (a cast of thousands), double check for accuracy, divide the sum by the total number of phone numbers to determine who in all of Fluor had the most average phone number, then call the guy to congratulate him and take him out for a long lunch. It was one of the most gloriously absurd things I've ever been part of.
So yesterday I got out of bed with a plan to make just one of your recipes, but I re-read the entire thread before starting and actually found something appealing about every single one so in the interest of showing, like a good mother, no favoritism, and having no bias of my own since I've never made baked beans before, in the end I made what you could call The FLDG Most Average Baked Bean.
Only, there was nothing at all average about the baked beans I made. Of all the food on the table last night for our 50 guests, good as everything else including the smoked tri tip and baby backs were, it was the baked beans that got all the buzz. About half a dozen people hunted me down to tell me the FLDG Most Average Beans were the best they've ever had. I, too, thought so, so thank you everyone.
Here's how I went about it.
The beans, three pounds of Great Northern since I could not find the tinier Navy I'd have preferred, were cooked on Saturday so that all I had to do was assemble for the long day of baking yesterday morning. I took them deliberately to within about half an hour of true tender because I didn't want my beans to have the soft texture of those awful canned pork n' beans--it worked out in the end but honestly, for about the first 7 hours of the total 8 hours they cooked I wasn't sure they were going to. I think I could/should actually cook them a little longer next time.
Then yesterday morning I started adding ingredients to a very large bowl, adding by the half cup fulls and checking after each addition for balance and spice. In went Howie's dark molasses for traditional flavor cut by Carl's maple syrup because I'm just not crazy about heavy molasses flavor. Then in went the mustard--your recipes varied from Carl's 1/2 tsp to Drew's 2 tsps, so I just started adding by the teaspoon full and in the end went further than any of you for a total of eight. I liked that bite. In also went Drew's barbecue sauce, the last half of a smallish bottle that had probably held 12 ounces of a sweet and spicy barbecue style "finishing sauce" that Cynthia and Stuart sent me, a slug of Jack Daniels, four fresh bay leaves, white wine vinegar, a few handfuls of brown sugar, ample fresh ground black pepper, and diced onion. When I was happy with the complexity and intensity of what I had, I added the beans and the diced salt pork, then enough chicken stock to be sure the beans didn't go dry. (I'd forgotten to save some of the cooking liquid before draining the beans, as per Carl's recipe, but forgot.) More for symbolism than effect, I added a chopped fresh tomato in honor of Celia, then divided the mixture between two cooking vessels and popped one of Karen's chipotles (dried) into each one.
At which point I realized that I could not get one of the two baking dishes I'd selected into the skinny oven (my Viking range has one big oven and one small, and I needed the big oven for other things). So I moved the contents into a crock pot and that's how half the beans got cooked. Interesting comparison: I preferred the crock pot's beans to the oven-baked. The oven baked beans darkened earlier and got drier than the crock pot beans. I had to add moisture back--I think I'd lower the temperature next time from 300 to 275.
In all, for three pounds of beans, here's what went in:
3 lbs great northern white beans
3/4 c dark molasses
3/4 c maple syrup
1 cup chipotle barbecue sauce
4 cups chicken stock
8 tsps dry mustard
4 bay leaves
1/3 c white wine vinegar
1 pound chopped salt pork
1 grapefruit sized vidalia onion, diced
1/2 cup Jack Daniels
1 chopped fresh tomato
Anyway, thanks everyone for your ideas and recipes--I used them all!
