Best beans ever!!! Beware, once you make homemade beans, you won’t be able to go back to eating pork and beans from a can!

You will need:

• 2 cups dried pinto beans
• 1/2 pound bacon
• chopped 1 onion, finely diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup ketchup
• 1 cup maple syrup (or more… I think I ended up using the whole bottle… oops! 🙂 )
• Few dashes Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp chili powder
• Few dashes Tabasco sauce (to taste)
• salt & pepper
• water (or beer?)

I rinsed and soaked the beans in water overnight, then boiled them for about an hour (you MUST precook your dried beans in boiling water for a minimum of 15 minutes to eliminate the chance of getting lectin food poisoning.  Slow cooking them is dangerous if they never reach a rolling boil.  Anyway, I cooked them for about an hour, and they were still a bit firm.  Then I drained and rinsed them again, poured them in a deep foil roasting pan, added all the other ingredients (bacon and onions were pre-cooked – use the bacon fat to fry the onions), plus enough water that the beans were covered in liquid.

Then we smoked them on the Big Green Egg at about 300F-350F for 5 hours or so using hickory. The smoke adds so much flavour to them!  If they start to look dry before they’re done, just add a bit more water.  Last time we actually added some beer, and it was pretty tasty, but probably not for everyone.  Water is fine.