I love my Crockpot for beans! We have buckets and buckets full of beans, and for some reason, we keep buying more! They are so much cheaper than canned beans, and they are so easy to cook.   For our Sunday night dinner, we made Hawaiian Baked Beans, and decided to eat them like Hawaiian Haystacks (adding rice, coconut, pineapple, and slivered almonds!).  They turned out delicious. 

While slow cooking your beans is super easy, it does take a bit of experimenting to get the timing right for your specific slow cooker.  When you are used to the perfect texture of canned beans, you’ll want to cook your beans long enough to no longer be crunch AT ALL!  This took me almost 7 hours with my pintos, but your time will vary.

When I am making beans from scratch, I start the night before.  I add a few cups (in this case 3 cups) of dried pinto beans to a bowl, and cover with water!   Make sure to add triple the water to beans.  Your beans will expand a bit as it soaks up the water.

After beans have soaked, put them in the crockpot, covered in water, and turned on high for 4-7 hours, depending on your crockpot, and how soft you like your beans. I start checking them at about 5 hours.   

Once they are soft, drain your beans, and return to the slow cooker.  Add 

• 1 can crushed pineapple
• 1 cup of BBQ Sauce

A word on BBQ sauce!!  You can make your own bbq sauce, but many recipes either have ketchup (also hard to find some without HFCS) or adding loads of sugar.  I only found two brands that don’t use High Fructose Corn Syrup (if you know of others, please let me know in the comments), but I turned over about 50 bottles of BBQ sauce before I found the two. The first was sweetened with Xylitol (which of course cost twice as much). The second was Tony Roma’s brand.  But YIKES on the sodium, which is why we only used 1/2 the bottle!! Here was the ingredients:

After adding the BBQ sauce and crushed pineapple, we let it simmer and thicken in the slow cooker for another 1-2 hours.   

Then, the best part!  Dinner was:

• Our baked beans
• Brown Rice
• Shredded coconut
• Slivered almonds
• Extra pineapple, chunked or sliced.

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