Creamy Baked Bean Pasta Recipe

This post is part of the Eating on a Budget series, which includes the essential tools, tricks and tips that underpin eating on a budget, and a collection of recipes to put those tools into practice.

Baked Beans are often the punchline for jokes revolving around British cuisine (or the lack thereof).

But this culinary British (and Kiwi) pantry staple is not only cheap but also surprisingly healthy (more on that later).

While baked beans on toast is a go-to for many Brits, there are more interesting ways to use baked beans.

One example is my budget-friendly cheesy baked bean pasta.

It’s a simple yet delicious dish made up of baked beans, pasta, and cheese. It is relatively healthy, and it can be ready in less than 20 minutes.

Although simple, it’s also highly customisable. You can add a bunch of ingredients to enhance the sauce, as well as bulk out the recipe with extra vegetables and other add-ons and garnishes. I’ll share some ideas later in this recipe.

But first, let’s discuss the core ingredients.

Core ingredients

The baked bean pasta relies on three cheap and common ingredients: baked beans, pasta, and cheese. If you have those, you have enough to do this recipe.

Baked Beans

Baked beans are delicious, but what exactly are they, and how are they prepared?

They’re actually extremely simple: they’re composed of haricot beans, tomato sauce and a blend of spices.

According to Business Insider, the haricot beans are imported dry, rehydrated, mixed with tomato sauce and spices, and then everything is steamed together inside the tin.

That means you don’t need to cook baked beans before eating them; they’re ready to eat straight from the can.

Haricot beans are a great source of protein, and together with the tomato sauce, baked beans provide 2 of your 5-a-day. Also, because everything is cooked directly in the can, all of the nutrients from the beans are preserved — nothing is discarded.

They’ll be great food to have stocked up when global warming destroys the earth and we’re all living in underground bunkers.

(Incidentally, it’s funny that baked beans are often the associated with British cuisine, as it’s actually an American invention. The haricot beans, which are native to the US, are still imported from the states by Heinz to this very day).

To cook this dish in it’s simplest form, we’ll heat up the beans and mix them through with the cooked pasta, cheese and some of the pasta water, as well as any other add-ons.

Pasta

Any pasta would work fine for this dish, but I feel that a short pasta works best.

I’d recommend something like penne or fusilli. Avoid spagetti, linguine or other longer pasta shapes.

To cook this dish, cook the pasta in heavily salted water for 2 minutes less than the packet suggests. Strain the pasta, but reserve some of the pasta water. The starchy pasta water will help create a thicker, richer sauce.

Cheese

You could throw any cheese into this mix, and it’s going to taste good — there’s no doubt about it.

But for baked bean pasta, I’d recommend a soft, melty cheese such as cheddar, havarti or gruyere.

Harder cheese, like parmesan, wouldn’t melt and softer cheeses, such as feta or mozzarella wouldn’t give the right consistency.

Optional add-ons

While those core ingredients will deliver a dish that’s delicious, there’s a lot you can do to take this baked bean pasta to the next level.

This dish is a great base to add whatever you’ve got on hand. If you have extra vegetables, spices, or condiments, you can add them to the mix.

Alliums

Almost any dish I cook relies on a base of onion and garlic, two vegetables from the allium family.

These veggies are like a “flavour starter pack“. Add them to anything and you’re bound to create a better dish.

To include these ingredients, we’ll start with onion: heat up approx. 1 tbsp of neutral oil (e.g. canola oil, avocado oil, vegetable oil, etc) on medium heat and slowly cook the diced onion. It will begin to caramelise and create a flavourful base.

Then, just before we mix in other ingredients (such as spices and umami bombs (see below) and the beans) we’ll add the garlic. Many recipes suggest cooking these ingredients at the same time, but if you cook the garlic for too long, it will burn or turn bitter — either way, not good.

Spices

Once you’ve added your alliums, you can start thinking about spices.

If you’ve already got spices on hand, now is the time to add them: cumin, coriander, paprika, curry powder, rosemary, thyme, dill and similar herbs would all be a great fit here.

To include them, we’ll bloom the spices, which means we’ll gently fry them in the oil to rehydrate them and infuse their flavour into the oil to create a rich base for our dish.

Once you’ve sufficiently cooked the onion, add the garlic for 1 minute, then include your spices along with the umami bombs (see below) and cook for approx. 30 seconds before including liquid components.

Umami bombs

Alongside your spices, there are a bunch of umami-rich condiments that you can add to this dish to take it to the next level.

We’ll use these umami bombs sparingly, but they will make a massive difference.

You can add a small amount of Marmite, soy sauce, anchovies and/or tomato puree to add a rich hit of umami. As with the spices, we’ll bloom them briefly for 30 seconds before adding the liquid.

Vegetables

Any vegetables can be added to this dish to bulk it out and add some extra healthy goodness.

I generally add broccoli to this dish (stems included), but most vegetables would be fine.

Garnishes

Finally garnishes — those little details that really finish off the baked bean pasta.

A splash of lemon juice will add a little acidity and a garnish of some finely diced herbs and some toasted seeds make the dish look like something out of a restaurant.

Cheesy baked bean pasta recipe

Serves: 2-3

Ingredients

• 400g can baked beans
• 200g fusilli pasta
• 1-2 medium onions, sliced
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 1 tsp Marmite
• 1 tsp tomato puree
• 70g cheddar cheese, grated (approx 1 tbsp reserved for garnish)
• Vegetable oil (or butter)
• Pasta water, reserved
• Handful parsley¹, minced (optional)
• Black pepper
• Salt (to taste)

Directions

1. Add approx. 1 tbsp vegetable oil (or butter) and the sliced onions to a frying pan over medium-low heat with a pinch of salt. Cook for approx. 10 minutes until the onions are sweated and lightly caramelised.
   
2. Meanwhile, cook the pasta as per the packet instructions in a pan of boiling, seasoned water. Use just enough water to submerge the pasta. This will leave us with more starchy water, which we’ll use in the sauce.
   
3. After 10 minutes, add the garlic, tomato puree and Marmite to the onions and cook for approx. 1 minute.
   
4. Then add the baked beans and approx 1 tbsp of pasta water² to the pan and stir. Add approx. 50g of the cheddar.
   
5. Turn the heat up to medium-high and cook the sauce for approx. 1-3 minutes until it thickens (I added rosemary here – see notes).
   
6. Drain the pasta and mix it through the sauce. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed.
   
7. To plate up, add the pasta to a plate. Garnish with black pepper, the reserved cheddar cheese, herbs (i.e. parsley) and black pepper.
   

Notes

1. I had no parsley, so used rosemary. It’s a much much potent flavour and I added the herbs earlier as they’re a hard herb.
2. Add the pasta water to the baked bean tin to slosh up the last bits of beans and tomato sauce left in the tin.