4th of July BBQ Recipes: No Excuses BBQ Smoker Style Baked Beans

Another great intro to our 4th of July BBQ Recipes series!  If you are going to go to all the trouble of cooking something that is going to be on the top rack of your BBQ smoker for several hours, you might as well put that bottom rack to use and cook up a big batch of BBQ Beans, Smoker Style.

This recipe takes advantage of those nice drippings that render out of the meat as it cooks and adds a great additional flavor to the beans. The batch you see in the pictures below sat under a ham for about 3 hours, but you can get great results with ribs, brisket, or other slow-cooking meats.

Ingredients:

• 1 – 15 oz. can Great Northern Beans
• 1 – 15 oz. can Black Beans
• 1 – 15 oz. can Pinto Beans
• 1 – 15 oz. can Kidney Beans
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 6-8 slices of bacon
• 1 large sweet onion
• 3 tbs. mustard
• 3 tbs. of your favorite BBQ sauce (or whatever you have on hand)
• 1/4 cup molasses
• 1 tbs. minced garlic
• 1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper (optional)

Preparation

Drain the juice from the black, pinto, and kidney beans. Mix them up with the vegetarian beans in a foil drip pan.

Chop up the bacon and fry it until done. Spoon onto a paper towel to drain.

Drain most of the grease, retaining at least 2-4 tbs. Chop the onion up small, and fry in the bacon grease until well-cooked.

Add the drained bacon, sauteed onions, and the rest of the ingredients to the beans. Stir well.

Place on the lower BBQ smoker grill. Be sure and center it below where your drip meat will be cooking.

Put your other items on the BBQ smoker and let cook until the meat is done.

I typically run the BBQ smoker between 215°F and 250°F (depending on what I am cooking); at these temperatures the beans will happily cook away without a lot of attention. If you are cooking something that requires higher smoking temperatures you’ll want to keep a closer eye on these to make sure they don’t boil away. Here’s what this batch looked like when they were done:

We’ve had great results doing this under ribs, ham, brisket, and country style pork ribs. At some point we will give it a try under a pork butt or two, although we won’t leave them under the butts for the full cook.  As 4th of July BBQ Recipes go, this is a definite keeper!

One of the tricks we learned when making a batch with the brisket is that 3 hours is generally more than enough to get great results, but anything longer than that will get too greasy and you’ll end up having to drain off a lot of fat.

These can also be cooked in a much shorter time; generally anything over an hour will yield a batch of beans that will get your friends talking.

Or laughing and groaning when the side effects set in…

Thanks to Mr. Zydecopaws himself, Paul Haight – author of the No Excuses BBQ blog and Certified BBQ Judge for this awesome Smoked BBQ Beans recipe.  No 4th of July BBQ Recipes collection would be complete without a great baked beans entry!

If you haven’t connected with Paul on twitter, you can find No Excuses BBQ on Twitter, and can also connect with Paul on the No Excuses BBQ Facebok page.

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