We’ll admit it, you can crack open a can of baked beans and heat it up and they’re already pretty darn good. But! You can crack open a can of baked beans and doctor it up a bit and they’re even better. And still totally easy. And these Hawaiian Baked Beans… ohhhh boy, with the savory magic of bacon and the sweet tang of pineapple, you’ll be beating back requests for the recipe. It’s nice to throw something different into the mix every once in a while and these are a nice break from your standard potluck side of beans… though they’re so tasty, it’s kind of a hard break to return from.
You can bake your beans in the oven (about 1 1/2 hours at 350°F if you’re going to go that route), but we’re all about the slow cooker around here. We love that it doesn’t heat up the kitchen and that you pretty much just have to turn it on and forget about it until dinner time. Whenever we can let a little ol’ appliance do the work for us, we’re sold.
Slow cooking the beans in this sweet sauce caramelizes the flavor of the pineapple and simmers the sauce down into beautiful syrupy goodness. For a thicker sauce, you can leave the lid off the slow cooker for the last 30 minutes or more of cooking until the sauce reaches the consistency you like.
All you have to do to create this deliciousness is combine a few cans of baked beans with some canned pineapple (juice and all), some dark brown sugar, crispy bacon, savory onions, and let it simmer away until those beans are coated in a sweet and savory sauce that’s the stuff dreams are made of. That’s a very small amount of effort for a whole lot of flavor!
