Baked Beans with Ground Beef

Southern-style Baked Beans with ground beef is a delicious side dish that uses canned baked beans with other ingredients for a simple recipe that is full of flavor.

Video: Making Baked Beans with Ground Beef

What Are Southern Baked Beans?

I’m a big fan of ground beef recipes, and in fact, this ground beef and rice skillet is one of the most popular recipes of mine on this site and on TikTok. But when I want something saucier that feeds a crowd, I turn to Southern Baked Beans With Ground Beef.

This recipe is a traditional Southern way to make canned baked beans taste even better. It’s also a great way to inexpensively stretch some lean ground beef and bacon to feed a lot of people. 6 strips of bacon, 1 pound of ground beef, and 2 cans of baked beans ends up giving you enough for 18 servings of half a cup each. For heartier eaters, you can serve 9 or 10 people easily. 

You use canned baked beans mixed with the meat, peppers and onions, and some sauce ingredients to make a big pot of sweet, savory, and saucy loaded beans.

Ingredients For Southern Baked Beans

For the beef, I use lean ground beef. If you use something with a higher fat content, you’ll just need to spoon off some of the fat after frying it.

Instead of ground beef, you can use half ground beef and half ground pork. All ground pork is a bit too rich for this. You can also use ground chicken or ground turkey. I would avoid using ground chicken breast or ground turkey breast though because those are quite lean and dry.

There’s some tasty bacon in this recipe that I chop up before cooking it. If you’d rather though, you can cook the strips and then chop them after cooking them. Or you can buy pre-cooked bacon slices and chop those up. You’ll just want to add a tablespoon of cooking oil or butter before sautéeing the peppers and onions since you won’t have any bacon fat to use. Yes, that’s right, the peppers and onions are cooked in bacon fat!

Which brings me to the peppers and onions. I use a green bell pepper because I like the bits of color it adds to the dish. But you can use a different color of pepper. If you’d like this to be spicy, you can use two jalapeno peppers minced, and remove the seeds before chopping them. For the onion, any onion will do, but a big sweet Vidalia or Texas onion is always a great choice too.

There are two 28 ounce cans of baked beans in this dish. That’s 56 ounces total. If your beans are in different sized cans than that, that’s fine. Just try to get between 50-60 ounces of beans total. If you want to stretch this pot of food even further, you can add as much as 84 ounces (that’s adding a third 28 ounce can). You can then use the same amount of beef, bacon, peppers, and onions, or add more of any of those. As to the other ingredients, you would definitely want to increase those. So increase the salt, pepper, brown sugar, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and yellow mustard by 1 third. So, for 84 ounces of canned baked beans you’ll use 3/4 tsp. salt, a dash extra of black pepper, 1/3 cup of brown sugar, 1/3 cup of ketchup, 1 and 1/2 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, and 3 teaspoons of mustard.

As to those flavoring ingredients, you’ll possibly notice that this recipe calls for less brown sugar and ketchup than many Southern baked bean recipes. I’ve done that because different brands and flavors of canned baked beans have different levels of sweetness and tomatoeyness. I decided to therefore use less of the sugar and ketchup in case the brand of beans you buy has a lot of that going on already. After your beans have cooked for a bit, you’ll taste the mixture and then add more brown sugar and ketchup if needed.

What Kind Of Baked Beans?

I tested this recipe with three different brands of baked beans, and they were quite different in terms of how much sweetness they needed added to them. I decided to go with the lowest amount of ketchup and brown sugar and then let you decide if you want it sweeter. The result, even when using the least sweet of the canned baked beans, is still a nicely flavored sweet sauce that I think you’re going to love. 

So this recipe will work with your favorite kind of baked beans, and add to adjust from there. And just so you know, my preference for brand and flavor of beans was the Bush’s Original Baked Beans. 

How To Make Baked Beans With Beef

We’re cooking everything in a large pot or Dutch oven. Start by cooking the chopped bacon. Spoon out some of the fat (discard it or save it for another use), then add in your onion and green pepper. Once the veggies start to soften, push all that to the side and add the ground beef to the other side of the pot. When that starts to brown, you can start breaking it up and mixing it in with the other ingredients.

Now, it’s time to add some extra flavor with brown sugar, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and yellow mustard. Then pour in your baked beans, sauce and all. Simmer all that for 10 minutes and give it a taste. Based on the kind of baked beans you used, you may want to add more salt or brown sugar.

After you get it tasting perfect for you, you can continue to let it simmer uncovered for up to another 20 minutes on low. It depends on how thick you want the sauce to be. It’s already pretty thick without that last simmer, but I know that a lot of people like their Southern beans to be stick-a-spoon-in-and-it-stands-up thick!

Need to keep it warm for a bit? Putting it on the grill or smoker does the trick and gives it a bit of smoky flavor too. Bonus!

Can I Halve The Recipe?

I realize that this recipe makes a lot, which is great for big gatherings, but maybe not for a standard weeknight. Yes, this baked bean recipe can be cut in half.

I honestly thought about making it half as the original recipe. But then you’d need 1/2 a pound of ground beef, 1/2 of a green bell pepper, and 1/2 of an onion, all of which are less convenient amounts. It absolutely works to do that though along with with just one can of beans.

You can also just go ahead and do the full amount of beef, pepper, and onion. Reduce the amount of bacon by half and just use 1 can of beans. Reduce the other ingredients by about half also. Your final mixture will be meatier, but trust me, it’s so delicious!