A Love Letter to South African Indian Baked Beans Curry

A foolproof recipe that uses baked beans and other pantry staples to create a delicious, glossy red-ochre curry that is perfect between two slices of white bread, or even as pizza topping.

Baked beans curry simply doesn’t receive the love it deserves. It is hands down one of the tastiest curries in the South-African-Indian recipe book, but no one ever really talks about it. I suspect one of the chief reasons people don't loudly extol the virtues of baked beans curry is because it is a cheap and dead simple dish to prepare — and, of course, the main ingredient is heavily processed, and comes out of a can — not exactly something you’d want to post on Instagram, or the family WhatsApp group.

Baked beans curry, much like tin-fish curry, is the dish you cook on a busy Tuesday night when you’re short on time or money, or both. It isn’t something you’d serve to relatives on Saturday lunch. They would instead be served a mutton or chicken curry, or a breyani — the trinity of fail-safe South-African-Indian visitor food.

While it might not be fancy enough for visiting relatives, I have always been a big fan of canned baked beans — especially brands such as Heinz and the South African Koo. You could crack open a can and eat the saucy beans straight up, accompanied by chunks of fresh unsliced white bread, which is exactly what my friends and I do on bush hikes. The only thing we’d add to the can were green chillies, roughly sliced with a rather rusty Okapi knife.       

There is also the classic South African braai (BBQ) staple: baked beans salad, whose crunchy texture and tomatoey acidity is the perfect foil for charcoal-grilled lamb chops and spicy mutton sausages. It is also a favourite fixture in fried, greasy Sunday breakfasts.

But it is in curry that I most appreciate baked beans, a form in which it reaches its truest iteration. The recipe itself, as I’ve mentioned, is pretty straightforward. Indeed, it is so idiot-proof that for many young South African Indians, myself and my brother included, it is the first curry we learn to cook — a sort of join-the-dots curry. There are, of course, variations from family to family, and region to region. Mine is a combination of the recipe my mother taught me, and improvisations based on what's in my pantry. 

But it all starts with a can of beans, more specifically, a can of white haricot beans that have been cooked in a thick, tangy tomato sauce. This simple canned concoction is added to a pot where mustard seeds, an onion, green chillies, curry leaves, a combination of traditional Indian spices, ginger-garlic paste, and a chopped tomato have already been frying, as a base curry ‘paste’ of sorts.

The beans and sauce need a few minutes to heat up, and combine with the paste before your curry is ready. Season and garnish with coriander. I usually add a teaspoon of ketchup and sometimes a dash of Worcestershire sauce to amp up the umami, but I will be the first to admit that this is highly unorthodox. The curry can be eaten with either rice, or shop-bought white bread, preferably with a dollop of achar. It can also be cushioned in a toasted sandwich in the unlikely event of leftovers. I know that some people even use it as pizza topping.

The cult South African recipe book, Indian Delights by Zuleikha Mayat, includes a more-ish recipe for a casserole using baked beans curry, bell peppers, macaroni, and cheese — a dish we often ate growing up. The book, published by the Women's Cultural Group Durban, has consistently been in print since the early 1960s, and lists a base recipe that can be used to make curries out of ‘any variety of tinned foods’.     

Baked beans curry is such a delicious, fragrant curry. The sweet-savouriness of beans marries wonderfully with the earthy heat of spices. The colour you're looking for is a deep, glossy red ochre, which is a hallmark of Durban-style, which is to say, South African, curries. As with many curries, baked beans curry often tastes better the next day.

If you wanted to bulk up the dish, you could do what we often did in my house as a kid, and throw in chopped Vienna sausages, or hotdogs, or boiled eggs, or mutton sausages, while it is still cooking. In short, an absolute knock-out hybrid curry that you can add to, adapt and make your own.

Recipe: Baked Beans Curry 

Ingredients
1 (415 g) can of baked beans
1 yellow onion, sliced
1 tomato, diced
2-3 split green chillies
1 teaspoon chilli powder
½ teaspoon cumin powder
½ teaspoon coriander powder
¼ teaspoon turmeric powder
1 teaspoon crushed ginger-garlic paste 
1 teaspoon ketchup
½ cup of fresh coriander leaves
½ tsp mustard seeds
½ cup curry leaves

Method
Heat 2-3 tablespoons of vegetable oil in a pot.
Add mustard seeds.
Once mustard seeds begin to splutter, add onions, curry leaves, and chillies.
Fry until onions are translucent.
Add chilli powder, cumin powder, coriander powder, turmeric powder, and ginger-garlic paste.
Allow the spices to fry for about 30 seconds before adding the tomato. Fry for an additional 2-3 minutes.
Add baked beans, ketchup and mix thoroughly.
Allow the beans to heat up and simmer for 5 minutes.
Season with salt and garnish with coriander.

Pravasan Pillay is a South African writer who now lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Banner image credit: ChefSteps

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