Baked Beans With Sweet Pickle Juice

Generally, there isn’t a lot of difference between most baked bean recipes. They usually all have brown sugar, molasses, mustard, onions and some sort of pork product: salt pork, or bacon. I found a recipe in one of my Saveur magazines last year that sounded a little different(http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Sandys-Baked-Beans). The chef added juice from a sweet pickle jar…interesting. This is my version. I recently inherited two 2-quart old-fashioned bean pots. Before inheriting the pots I would put some pork and beans, brown sugar, molasses, onions and bacon in a crock pot and let them cook all day trying to achieve the baked bean consistency. They were okay that way, but the slices of bacon never got to be crisp, and the onions were just sort of limp and anemic. With a bean pot, the beans cook in the oven and the bacon gets brown and crisp, and the onions turn caramel brown…so much better! Originally published on my blog.