Heinz Baked Beans

I have a confession. I hate Baked Beans. I remember as a kid being given them for lunch and refusing point blank to touch them. Often I starved. But maybe I was being unfair, maybe Baked Beans are actually amazing! This was all the inspiration I needed for my next blog post and off to my local convenience store I swagger jaggered…

So what am I going to do with them? After scrabbling around my professional chef’s kitchen cupboards looking for ideas, I found this:

Wasabe paste!

It seemed like fate was telling me to make some kind of disgusting-sounding-yet-probably-quite-delicious wasabe and Baked Bean sauce to use as part of some bizarre sushi dish! Yeah, didn’t see *that* coming did you! (er, unless you read the tags at the start of the post of course…)

Tally Ho! I start by adding the wasabe and the Baked Beans to a bowl (Hearafter known as BBs cos I can’t be arse typing Baked Beans over and over again):

and blend:

Shut up, this does in no way look like cat sick!

I have a quick taste….hmmm…..it’s edible; the Wasabe is not overpowering and the taste of the BBs is not unpleasant, but the texture is a bit grainy.

Lets soldier on and take a look at the other ingredients in my inspiring Japanese meal:

My choice of sushi is going to be a spicy smoked mackerel, shredded carrot and fennel maki, so I have all these ingredients plus some honey and rice wine vinegar for the sushi rice and some ginger for another soy dipping sauce.

So lets start by shredding some ginger, carrot and fennel (I have a hella sharp knife so I can do this, otherwise I suggest you use a grater):

And here’s where my camera failed and missed the part where I over cooked the sushi rice and basically made a bit of a mess at the maki roll assembly line, so erm I will just let you judge how it must have gone:

Can’t see anything inept about any of that. Oh no. But how does my maki taste with my so-crazy BB and wasabe sauce?

The maki with it’s watery rice lacks flavour, which is a shame, because the BB sauce is actually not at all bad; the wasabe is quite subtle and the BBs don’t overpower what flavours there are from the fennel and carrots. I try the control sauce of the soy and ginger and that’s nice too because it adds a richness to the dish. Finally I try both sauces together with the last piece of maki and that’s not at all bad! But I’m still super bummed I over did the rice.

Overall, marginal fail. I’m disappointed that I made such a basic technical error but I’m happy that I could work the BBs into something I could eat for a change.

But tell me foodblogfan, what did you think of this dish? Visionary? Heartbreaking? Doomed for failure from the word go? Hmmmmm.

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Sianara 🙂