Hearty Southern Baked Beans With Ground Beef
This hearty Baked Beans with Ground Beef takes basic canned beans and turns them into a thick, smoky beef casserole! Just stir in seasoned hamburger meat, a quick homemade barbecue glaze, and top the whole thing with crispy bacon. With just 15 minutes of hands-on prep before going into the oven, you’ll get a rich, comforting main dish or hearty side that’s completely ready in an hour!
A Quick Look At The Recipe
- Recipe Name: Hearty Southern Baked Beans With Ground Beef
- Ready In: 60 minutes
- Serves: 9 cups
- Main Ingredients: Baked beans, Navy beans (or bean of your choice), Ground beef, Small onion, Barbecue sauce, Worcestershire sauce, Yellow mustard, Salt, Black pepper, Turkey bacon
- Why You'll Love It: You’ll love this recipe because it takes a standard can of cookout beans and turns it into a rich, deeply satisfying dish hearty enough to stand on its own as a main meal. By stirring savory ground beef into a quick, punchy barbecue glaze, you get the perfect balance of smoky sweetness and savory depth with just fifteen minutes of actual effort.
Baked Beans That Taste Like The Main Meal
In the South, we love to add our own spin to traditional recipes (I mean, just look at my zucchini stuffed boats!). Today, we’re talking about baked beans. Now, if you head to the UK, you’ll regularly get a small side serving of baked beans with breakfast. But this easy recipe for Southern baked beans with ground beef is a delicious main dish around here.
It’s one of the easiest Southern meals to make, as all you have to do is stir the ingredients together in a bowl. You can use a skillet or a 9×13 pan if you like. So, what ingredients do we combine to make baked beans? Besides the baked beans and ground beef, we’ve got navy beans, onion, and flavorful seasonings like barbecue sauce, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. This gives the baked beans a really delicious barbecue flavor that will have you wanting seconds!
Once you mix the ingredients, pop them into a baking dish, add a layer of bacon strips, and bake! It will be ready in under an hour. Now, I’ve included some serving suggestions below, but seeing as this is a Southern baked beans recipe, you can’t go wrong with a serving of homemade cornbread.
Alright, who’s ready to get baking and make this baked beans and beef casserole? I know I am!
Ingredients You’ll Need For This Baked Beans Recipe
- Baked beans
- Navy beans (or bean of your choice)
- Ground beef
- Small onion
- Barbecue sauce
- Worcestershire sauce
- Yellow mustard
- Salt
- Black pepper
- Turkey bacon
Expert Tips from My Kitchen
- Cook the Beef Ahead: I make this for my family all the time, and my favorite time-saving tip is to keep pre-cooked, drained ground beef in the freezer. When I need to whip this up for an unexpected crowd, I can just thaw the meat and stir everything together in under five minutes!
- Don’t Drain the Liquid: It might be tempting to pour off the liquid from the canned navy beans, but you want to leave it in. That starch helps bind the ground beef mixture together, ensuring the sauce thickens up into a rich glaze rather than drying out in the preheated oven.
- Give It Time to Sit: When the timer goes off, the sauce might still look a little loose at the surface. Don’t panic and leave it in the oven to dry out; the sauce continues to thicken up significantly as it cools down to room temperature. Give it about ten minutes on the counter before serving.
- Jazz It Up For Company: Tossing in a diced green bell pepper or a red bell pepper with the onions adds a wonderful color and crunch, while a cup of brown sugar or a splash of apple cider vinegar can push the sweet-and-tangy profile even further!
“Thanks for the delicious supper!”
“I made this tonight with hot water cornbread and hub loved it and asked me to fix it again soon. Thanks for our delicious supper!”
How to Make Baked Beans With Ground Beef
1. Prep the Base
Preheat your oven to 350°F and spray a standard 9×13 baking dish or a large cast-iron skillet with nonstick cooking spray. If you haven’t already, brown your pound of ground beef over medium-high heat in a large skillet, draining away all the excess grease.
2. Mix the Ingredients
In a large bowl, combine your undrained baked beans, undrained navy beans, and the cooked beef. Toss in your finely chopped onion, followed by the cup of BBQ sauce, Worcestershire sauce, yellow mustard, salt, and black pepper.
3. Stir Well
Give the whole mixture a good stir until the seasonings are completely incorporated and the beef is distributed evenly throughout the beans.
4. Top With Bacon
Pour the mixture into your prepared casserole dish. Take your slices of bacon and lay them flat across the top of the beans. As it bakes, the bacon fat will melt down into the casserole, infusing everything with a rich, smoky depth.
5. Bake
Place the dish uncovered into the oven and bake for 45 to 60 minutes. You’ll know it’s ready when the edges are bubbling fiercely, the center is set, and the bacon on top is cooked through and crisp. Let it rest for a few minutes before serving it up alongside a hot pan of homemade cornbread or soft, homemade dinner rolls!
Baked Beans With Ground Beef FAQs
Baked beans pair perfectly with classic Southern comfort foods like buttery cornbread, fluffy biscuits, or a cool, crisp coleslaw to balance out the sweetness. If you’re hosting a cookout, they are an incredible side dish for pulled pork, hamburgers, and grilled hot dogs.
You can make baked beans in the crockpot. The only difference is that I’d pre-cook the bacon and chop it up before adding the bacon bits and the remaining ingredients to your crockpot. Cook on low for 4 to 6 hours or on high for 2 to 3 hours.
Yes, you can! If you remove the ground beef, you’ve basically got a delicious baked bean casserole.
While plain beans and beef are naturally gluten-free, store-bought canned beans, barbecue sauces, and Worcestershire sauce often contain hidden wheat or barley thickeners. If you’re cooking for someone with celiac disease, just double-check the labels on your pantry staples to make sure they are explicitly marked gluten-free.
Similar Recipes
Beans are an incredibly versatile ingredient, and you can use them to make other delicious recipes like this 3 Bean Salad With Dressing or these simple Craving Beans!
Let me know what you’re having these baked beans with in the comments below!
Ingredients
- 28 ounce baked beans do not drain
- 30 ounce navy beans (or bean of your choice), do not drain, approximately 2 cans
- 1 pound ground beef cooked and drained
- 1 onion small, chopped
- 1 cup barbecue sauce
- 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
- 2 tablespoons yellow mustard
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
- 4 ounces turkey bacon uncooked, 3-4 slices
Instructions
- Prepare your skillet or spray a 9×13 baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.
- Stir together all ingredients except for the bacon.
- Spoon into the oven safe prepared skillet or baking dish and top with strips of uncooked bacon. Place in a 350-degree oven for 45-60 minutes.
My nickname was KoKo as I was always at the swimming pool in the water, never laying out! I was so brown (tan) that people used to say they knew it was me by the whites of my eyes! My older brother & his family called me Kokie and when my children heard them call me that they about fell over. As I grew older it was a nice sound to hear my friends mothers still call me Koko. As an adult I am called Ko back home to the friends in my hometown. I didn’t start that name when we moved here 22 years ago. You bring so many memories back to all of us! God Bless!
As I sit down tonight to go through my e-mail, I saw this & had to laugh. As my son is getting ready for bed tonight, he asked where he got his nickname “Sluggo”. When he was just newly born, he would lie on the couch besides my father. My father would ask “is that all he does? He is just laying there like a slugg.” It evolved to Sluggo & stuck!
hey there! First let me say I discovered you thanks to QVC and I’ve hooked ever since. I too am from a long line of nicknames. My grandmother was named Ruth Mary but was called Teddy. Her mother was Frances but they called her Frank. Enter my mother. Named Virginia Leslie, she has been called Pinkie by everyone she knows her whole life. To repay the favor, she decided the name she gave me at birth – Kimberly Sue – just wasn’t fun enough so she has called me Matilda or Tilly or Tilly Lou since then. She also renamed my brother from Scott Eric to Bum. I call him Bumble (from Rudolph) or Bumbelina. My dad calls me KimSue. Since I have no children of my own, I extend the fun to my pets. All of them over time have had several they will respond too! Who says you can’t train a cat? Great topic!!
My real name is “Sally Mae”! What a surprise when I read your post – I almost fell out of my chair! That is so funny. Don’t know where “Sally” came from but the “Mae” was from several aunts. I’m still laughing but I love my name! I have never heard anyone else called that. Thanks Christy for all your wonderful recipes!
Well, I’m not particularly proud of my nickname “Whineyblooper”. Something tells me I was spoiled! We called the beans with meat in them cowboy or ranch beans.
I really don’t remember having nicknames, but our youngest daughter, Robin, was called “Little Blue Eyes with rosebud lips” when my mother first saw her. As she grew to be a toddler, her 10 year old brother, Brandon, came up with an unusual nickname for his baby sis~ “Naked Fiddler Baby.” Now, Brandon started out to be “Brandy” until we realized everyone was calling their dogs that. But his grandma still calls him that at 35!!!
My momma has called me Blossoms ever since I can first remember. When I was a teenager I didn’t really care for it, but now I love to here her say it. She said she named me that cause I was purty as a flower and I always wanted to help in the garden. My husband and I now have a small plant nursery and we named it Blossoms Backyard Nursery…it was fate!
The funniest story though is that my granny ALWAYS called me Sandy and spelled in Sandie on my Christmas presents, cards, letters, etc. I would always say, “Granny, my name is Cindy, not Sandy”, and she would just laugh and say, “honey I know what your name is and to me you will always be Sandy Lou!” When she passed away several years ago I received a phone call from her insurance representative. He had been the one who serviced all of her insurance needs for as long as I can remember and he often made visits to Granny’s to do so. He had called to tell me that my granny had left me a little something on her life insurance but it would be a couple of weeks before I could get it. The reason for the delay was that she had put Sandie as the benefactors name and he would have to go through a verification process with the company to vouch for me and that my name was actually Cindy! I laughed so hard when he told me that and to this day I can still hear her calling me, “Sandie, get in here fore it gets dark”, or my favorite saying that I used to tease her about, “Sandie, get over here and hope me for a minute, I can’t see to thread this needle!”
One other nickname I had was from my paternal grandfather. According to stories, he was a business man and always had pens and paper stuck in his shirt pockets. Of course, being a small child I was always quite curious as to what Papa had in them pockets of his. I would climb up on his lap and start emptying them out and he would say, “Fingers Ma’Lou you have did it again!” LOL.
So if you call me Blossoms, Sandy, Fingers Ma’Lou, or the inevitable Cindy Lou Who, I will surely come running to “hope” you out!
BTW, Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons are the two best shows to have ever hit the “bube tube”!!!….IMHO! 😉