The Swicy Ingredient That Belongs On Your Canned Baked Beans

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Call us trend-chasers, but we can't get enough of everything swicy, which is shorthand for "sweet and spicy" when it comes to food. From sprinkling spicy Tajín seasoning on our watermelon to scooping up ready-made products like Blues Hog BBQ sauces, we can't get enough of the sweet-hot combination. It shouldn't surprise you that we're all over a hack to add big swice to one of our favorite canned foods: baked beans. All you have to do is swirl some hot honey into your canned beans, heat them up, and serve them alongside your lunch or dinner.

Baked bean giant Bush's Best sells Hot Honey Grillin' Beans already, but we're enamored with the idea that we can control the sweetness and spice of our beans by incorporating the hot honey to our personal taste when we DIY a pot of swicy beans. Furthermore, this is a great way to jazz up humdrum baked beans that are already sitting in your pantry. When dinner prep sounds like a real chore and you're short on inspiration, hot honey (which many people also already keep on hand) is an excellent shortcut to something novel and delicious.

It really doesn't matter what variety of baked beans you have on hand, and your preferred brand of hot honey is also up to you. Mike's Hot Honey professes that it is the number one choice worldwide, so that's an option if you're short a bottle, but don't get too pressed by the details. Simply squeeze hot honey into your beans — measure by your heart's instincts, though starting small and tasting along the way is a good strategy — get those beans hot, and enjoy!

The inspiration behind the swicy culinary trend comes from international flavors and an incessant cultural craving for new things. We can never stop riffing on a great idea, so we got thinking about the best ways to present our hot honey baked beans — and now, we can't stop!

Homemade recipes for hot honey baked beans generally call for generous amounts of bacon to stud the legumes and really increase the hearty umami character of the dish. Canned baked beans already contain all the good stuff like cooked navy beans and brown sugar, so you have a real opportunity to amp up the flavor by adding your meat of choice to your swicy baked beans. Extra bacon is a given, but how about some cooked chorizo for depth of spicy flavor that really adds oomph to your beans? It also ties in that worldly excitement that underpins the swicy trend in the first place.

We previously presented a recipe for three-ingredient baked bean chili mac, and we got giddy when we thought about making it with baked beans that had been spiked with hot honey. Dump your beans over boxed mac and cheese for a meal most kids will scrape their plates for, or simply pour them over a heap of rice and dig in! Like the British idea of beans on toast? Get cookin'! Hot honey baked beans + starch equals a full meal with limitless potential.