Bigly BBQ Beans

Folks. The bean situation in this country has gotten out of HAND. Somebody needs to say it. Canned baked beans, opened up, dumped in a bowl, set on a picnic table next to a pile of paper plates? That is not a side dish. That is a hostage situation. The beans deserve better. The cookout deserves better. YOU deserve better. And we are doing better. Today.

Many people don't know this. I've talked to scientists — and I'm talking real scientists, food chemists, very smart people, the kind who run gas chromatographs on bean sauce for FUN — and they all agree on this: beans were the original BBQ side. Before potato salad. Before slaw. Before that weird mayonnaise pasta salad with the cubed cheese cubes nobody actually eats. Cowboys ate beans. Pioneers ate beans. Statisticians have run the numbers. The beans built this country and somewhere along the way we got lazy, we started just opening the can, we forgot the beans. The beans never forgot us. The beans have been waiting. Today we honor the beans.

The secret is bacon, brown sugar, and TIME. You start with canned beans — we are not animals, we have lives, the dried-bean overnight-soak business is for retirees and food bloggers — and then you DOCTOR them. Render the bacon. Sweat the onions in the fat. Add the brown sugar, the mustard, the vinegar, the molasses. Bubble it low in the oven for an hour until the top caramelizes and the sauce reduces to lacquer. That's the trick. That's the whole game. Take my word for it.

This is the side dish that wins the cookout. This is the side dish that gets a SECOND helping, then a third, then somebody asking if they can take some home in a Tupperware. This is the side dish that makes your uncle — every family has one, the self-proclaimed 'grill master' who really just rotates hot dogs at the wrong angle — go quiet. A quiet uncle at a cookout is a rare thing, a beautiful thing, a gift. Thank me. Or thank the beans. The beans did the work. And there you have it.