Damn that's a good bowl of Chili!

Cafe Society
1

I made a batch of chili on Saturday from my tried and true recipe, with a few minor variations. 2 days later it has fully developed and might just be the best I’ve ever made. If you want to try some, here is exactly what I did:

~1.5 lbs beef chuck shoulder cut into cubes
~1 lb boneless pork shoulder, cut into cubes
1 medium white onion, diced
6 cloves garlic, minced

Spice mix:
1 tbsp cumin
3 tbsp chile powder
1 tsp cayenne
Blend spices in a bowl and add a couple generous pinches to a bowl of flour for dredging the meat cubes. Reserve the rest of the flour/spice mix for thickening after cooking.

Dredge the meat in the flour mix and add to a skillet with the onion and garlic. When well browned, add to a slow cooker.

Mix remaining spice mix with warm water to a medium consistency (thinner than a paste, thicker than a slurry)

Add spice mix to slow cooker along with the following:
Fresh oregano, chopped finely (finely chopped cilantro is optional - it tastes like soap to me so I don’t use it)
Fresh scallions, chopped
1 small can chipotle peppers (including liquid)
1 large sweet pepper, diced
2 1.25 lb cans diced tomatoes, strained

Mix all ingredients well and set slow cooker on lowest setting

Mix 3 tbsp dark cocoa powder with warm water and stir in to slow cooker when fully dissolved.

Cook on lowest setting for several hours, stirring periodically. Add a few pinches of flour/spice mixture to thicken as needed.

Now I’m from Texas originally, so I have moral objections to putting beans in chili. But if you want beans I suggest heating a large can of pinto beans separately and combining in a bowl when serving. Mixing beans with the chili keeps the flavor from developing, and chili is always better after it has sat for a couple days.

This recipe will get you a mild to medium chili, with just a bit of after burn. It’s good for the normies. I like a bit more heat, so I mix in a splash of ghost pepper mango sauce at the bottom of my bowl. My ghost pepper sauce is also home made, but I will never do that again because it turned my kitchen into a hazmat site for a couple days. Luckily the jar I have in the fridge should last a while.

2

How many servings?

3

Good question. I guess it depends on whether you mix it with beans (which 2/3 of my house does). I’ve served it at parties with about 20 people and had some left over. It lasts about a week with 3 people in the house. So I guess maybe 20-25? A bit fewer if they skip the beans.

4

Thank you.
My own contest-winning chili recipe was attached to the refrigerator…which burnt down to the ground when the house was destroyed a couple of Christmases ago. I am supposed to serve up chili for a community lunch on October 7th, and I am looking for a decent substitute.

5

The recipe I started with won the People’s Choice award at the Concho River festival in San Angelo Texas in the 80s. It also won a blue ribbon at my HOA’s chili contest a couple years ago. I used to keep it a secret. The cocoa powder was a tip I got from an old-timer in Texas. These days, I don’t much care about chili contests, so I’m all about sharing.

(And I empathize about the house fire - I lost everything in a house fire myself 10 years ago. It was a good lesson that everything is really just stuff.)

6

What kind of pepper does this mean? A bell pepper?

7

The best chili I ever had was made from moose. Obviously that’s of limited availability, though.

8

Is that you, Robert?

9

Yes.

10

I discovered this recipe a while ago. I leave out the green pepper and use stew beef instead of ground beef. I put in a few tablespoons of masa at the end as a thickener.

11

Sounds a bit like my chili, although I don’t use both beef and pork. I do make green chili stew with pork shoulder, however. I’m making a pot of my black bean chili tomorrow. I make it with chicken, but don’t be hatin’ on me.

12

Nice. We went to a chili-cook-off. None of the finalists were edible for us, all were ghost pepper level +. It seems like that is how they win nowadays- make a bowl of red too spicy to eat. :weary_cat:

I like my chili with lots of shredded cheese and saltines.

13

Years ago (late 70s) during one race weekend at a super speedway, they held a chili cookoff on Saturday. For the judging, the judges and samples in large styrofoam coffee cups were brought up to to the press box and they got busy judging. When the judges went to the infield to announce their decision, they left the chili samples behind.

A friend of mine who I shared an office with in the nearby university math department and I worked there as volunteers for every big race. After the judges left, the friend of mine took the samples and sat down to taste them. After a taste of each sample, he put it into one of three groups. I asked him what he was doing and he said that the first group was chili he would keep for himself to eat, the second group was chili he would keep to feed to his dog, and the third group to chili that he wouldn’t even feed to his dog.

14

My thoughts on adding beans to chili or not is that it is up to the chef and if you don’t like it, make your own chili.

From what I can tell, the “no beans in chili” comes out of chili cookoffs where they don’t want filler to interfere with the judging. Also, for a chili cookoff, you want every spoon of chili to be identical so in a traditional chili cookoff, they chop everything to very small pieces. Beans would be the largest items in the pot.

Ask the old time ranchers in my part of Texas about beans in chili and they will be puzzled by your question because they like it with or without beans. It seems to me that the ones who say that beans do not belong in chili are the very young who are repeating what they have heard and the city people.

Personally, beans in chili are fine. The only time I prefer chili without beans is if it is going to be used for frito pies and for hot dogs. Even then, the local bank’s yearly wienie fest has chili with beans to make the hot dogs into chili dogs.

15

For chili-dip or chili-dogs/burgers, you do not want beans.

Right.

For just a dish of chili, I want beans also.

16

There’s really no way to make a dish ghost pepper+ level, unless you’re using pure refined capsaicin. Ghost peppers are about the hottest there are (there are a couple of hotter ones, but only marginally), and they’re inevitably going to be diluted in a dish.

But there is a real dilemma, here. Heat even approaching ghost pepper level is going to be inedible to almost everyone, and there’s no point in heat just for the sake of one-upmanship. The heat level should be at the point that the chef (or other eaters) like it.

But on the other hand, I’ve given up on ever winning any informal chili competitions, like the one at my work every year, because if I make it the way I like it, it’s going to be too hot for all but maybe two of my co-workers. I don’t make it that way because I’m trying to make it as hot as possible: It’s far from that, and it is actually the way I like it. But there are probably some of my co-workers who would think (very incorrectly) that my chili was ghost-pepper hot, because all that really matters is that it’s off the scale (for them).

17

Okay, I was exaggerating to make a point. But I think we agree on the heat level.

18

Texan too, and if you’ve got to add beans, Ranch Style beans are pretty good in chili.

I typically use my dentist’s chili recipe.

19

My chili recipe, which won a state championship in 2010, would undoubtedly make any Texan-style purist turn up their nose - ground beef and pork, onion, lots of garlic, pinto beans, four kinds of chopped green peppers, in a sauce of beef broth and tomato sauce with chili powder, cumin, Sazon Goya, salt and pepper, Worcestershire sauce, a tiny drop of liquid smoke, and a spoonful of peanut butter, thickened with cornstarch slurry. I call it “Christmas chili” because of the green peppers and red broth.

I would describe it as “medium” heat-wise. Others have called it a chemical weapon.

20

I aim for low heat because I want others to be able to eat it. It’s a lot easier to add heat than it is to remove it. I like chili but a whole pot for myself is too much.

My father gave me the no beans rule for Texas chili based on the traditions of the San Antonio chili girls who served it without beans. Experience showed me that beans do absorb flavors and make the chili bland if you add them to the pot. I got in the habit of serving beans on the side for those who want them. Most of those folks have agreed that adding beans after cooking is better.