Vegan Cheater Baked Beans Recipe
Easy Meatless Baked Beans from Veganomicon
Read the review of Veganomicon to get the full scoop on the Ultimate Vegan Cookbook.
Cheater Baked Beans is an easy recipe to add a home-cooked taste to your vegetarian meal. Equally delicious using navy beans or Great Northern beans (or a combination), this recipe throws together in a snap using canned beans and bakes up in an hour. The flavour is just as baked beans should be - slow-cooked, slightly sweet, and like they took more effort than they did. Removing the beans from the oven half an hour early does not seem to impact their taste, if time is of the essence.
This vegan recipe does not have the pork fat usually found in commercial baked beans or the numerous forms of sugar (like liquid sugar or glucose-fructose) found in canned beans.
Cheater Baked Beans can be the main dish to a vegan meal, or a high-protein high-fibre addition. Serve as part of the Classic Vegetarian Breakfast, or a salad and sautéed spinach for dinner. Of course, leftovers make great vegan “wieners and beans” for lunch.
Cheater Baked Beans Recipe
By Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero
Used with permission, from Veganomicon, page 122.
Serves 6
Soy-free, gluten-free, no specialty shopping needed, low in fat.
Time: 75 minutes
These are “cheater” because the recipe uses canned beans – perfect for when you have some visitors from Boston drop by without any warning. We like them better than just using baked beans from a can because they aren’t cloyingly sweet. Serve with Smoky Grilled Tempeh (page 130) and collards (page 106). Or, slice up tofu dogs and throw ‘em in, see if we care.
Ingredients:
- 2 tbsp. olive oil
- 1 medium-size yellow onion, diced as small as you can
- 1 (15-ounce) can tomato sauce
- ½ cup light molasses (not blackstrap)
- 2 tsp. mustard powder
- 1 tsp. salt
- ¼ tsp. ground allspice
- 1 bay leaf
- 2 (15 ounce) cans small white beans (about 4 cups, drained and rinsed)
Directions:
- Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
- Preheat a medium-size oven-safe pot over medium heat. Sauté the onions in the oil for about 10 minutes; you want them to be a little bit browned, but definitely not burnt, just a little caramelized. Add the garlic and sauté for one more minute. Add the tomato sauce, molasses, mustard, salt, allspice, and bay leaf, and cook for about 5 minutes.
- Add the beans, then cover the pot and transfer it to the oven for an hour. Give it a stir just once, about 30 minutes into the baking process. The sauce should thicken and sweetened. Keep warm until ready to serve.
Want more? Read the full review of Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook.
