Mr Bean: Andalucian style

Baked beans, also known as Boston beans or Navy beans. The commercial product is packed with sugar and salt – even the reduced versions. However, it is relatively easy to make H J Heinz rather jealous by making them in your own home.

It takes a while (simmering tomatoes and the ingredients for 2-3 hours) but you can save time by buying canned or jarred haricot beans. In Spain all beans tend to be lumped into the ‘Alubia’ category but the small ones on the supermarket shelves are haricot and the large ones are generally butter beans.

This recipe gives a delicious tangy, zingy flavour that you will never, ever, ever get out of a tin no matter what the marketing people at Heinz say.

For the sauce:

1.5kg ripe and juicy tomatoes of your choice, chopped

75ml cider vinegar

5 cloves

2 green cardamon pods

¼ tsp white pepper

¼ tsp ground nutmeg

¼ tsp ground cassia bark (you can also use cinnamon)

1 tsp Paprika (I use hot smoked)

50g sugar

2 cloves garlic, chopped

2 or 3 sun dried tomatoes (rehydrated), chopped

This is the easy bit. Add all ingredients into a large pan, bring to a boil then simmer for 2 ½ or 3 hours.

Allow to cool before passing through a food mill, add the beans to the liquid then spoon into sterilised jars.

They are so gorgeously delicious they won’t last very long. Enjoy on hot buttered toast.