Skip to main content
Main

Baked Beans À LA Crockpot

A slow‑cooked bean dish flavored with ketchup, brown sugar, molasses, mustard, and spices.

From the Recipes Wiki (Fandom) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 2,711 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

The recipe

Oven200
Time10–12 hours

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the beans

  1. Wash and sort beans. Cover with water and bring to a boil.

  2. Boil for 2 minutes and remove from heat.

  3. Let soak for 2 hours.

  4. Bring to a boil again and then simmer about an hour or until cooked, but not soft or mushy.

  5. Drain beans.

Slow cook

  1. Put beans in the crockpot.

  2. Mix the remaining ingredients together and stir into the beans.

  3. Turn on low and cook for 10–12 hours.

  4. Or add ½ cup tomato juice, cover tightly, and cook in a 200 oven overnight.

Recipe from the Recipes Wiki (Fandom).

This recipe comes from the Recipes Wiki on Fandom and is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Our formatting and summaries are shared under the same licence.

Steps grouped into stages for easier reading; the method is the source's own.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Beans + tomatotop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,711 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Beans + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together20,622 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beans + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together5,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beans
Provide the main body and texture of the dish as they cook tender in the sauce.
Onion
Adds savory aroma and sweetness as it softens into the sauce.
Catsup
Adds tomato acidity and sweetness that balances the rich sauce.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps deepen the color of the sauce during long cooking.
Molasses
Adds dark sweetness and a deep, slightly bitter flavor to the sauce.
Dry mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent aroma that cuts through the sweetness.

The step that matters

Simmer the beans until just cooked. The beans keep cooking for many hours in the sauce, so they should be tender but firm at this stage. Starting too soft leaves them mushy after the slow cook.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, sugar, mustard, molasses, ginger, tomato):

  1. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  2. Sweet potatobetter flavor fit
  3. Broccolibetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, sugar, mustard, molasses, ginger, tomato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Illustration of Tomato SoupIllustrationTomato Soup526 recipesIllustration of Cream of Tomato SoupIllustrationCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesIllustration of Tomato BisqueIllustrationTomato Bisque61 recipesIllustration of Molasses SauceIllustrationMolasses Sauce32 recipes