Yes! This is exactly the method I acquired. I use a lot of mild, and a fair mount of their medium to any chili. I like to fry the meat with at least some of the chili powder, this adds a deep flavor to the finished product. Cookbooks and chili-cookoff winners also add their powders right before serving as well.
Penzeys has great Chili powder, but I was underwhelmed by their Mexican oregeno, another essential ingredient to good chili.
I still have a container of what once was finely ground Mexican oregeno that my mom bought years, if not decades ago. Most spices are only good for a few months, but this stuff is wonderful, very pungent. Penzeys, and everyone else apparently, sells Mexican oregeno in leaf form. The flavor was just a pale imitation. What’s up with that??
I’ve seen recipes with a half cup of chili powder.
Chili powder:
There are jars of it. Typically nothing wrong with these. Usually not hot.
Home made. . .you can buy dried anchos/pasillas/etc. at a lot of places nowadays. You can roast them, seed them, and then make your own chili powder in a blender. At least you have some control over it. Usually not hot.
Cayenne. This is where heat in my chili comes from. This probably technically chili powder, but it is sold as “cayenne pepper”. Or maybe I’m wrong. . .it might be a grind of some sort of pepper corn, but I always thought it was a ground pepper. Either way, it’s my heat.
Chili:
Mine’s all over the place.
Personally, I like just beef, onions, garlic, and tomatoes (28 ounce can of whole, peeled). Sometimes I’ll saute jalapenos or throw in some chipotles.
Wife likes kidney and/or black beans in it.
I could do it without tomatoes.
Sometimes I make it with lamb.
Also, for my non-special chili, I buy a pre-packaged spice mixture at the store. It’s essentially cumin and chili powder and cayenne. I like the mixture.
Lately I’ve been substituting one or more cans of tomatoes with an equal amount of tomatoes with chiles. I like it a lot - easier on my eyes and hands than dicing fresh chiles, and a “fresher” taste than all dried powdered peppers. I still use chili powder, cumin and cayenne for heat (different kinds of heat - sweet heat, dark heat and bright heat, respectively) and onion, garlic and oregano for flavor.
Am I the only person who boils the meat rather than fries it? And includes vinegar, cinnamon, garlic, and allspice along with the cumin and scads of chili powder? I also put in a few whole bay leaves (count them so you can pull them out when done; no one likes to bite into a bay leaf, trust me).
One tip: I’ve found cooking with tabasco to be a little disappointing if you leave the chili simmering for a long time. I recently found a bottle of habanero at a spice store and add just two drops; it blows you’re head off no matter how long the chili is left on the stove. Use with caution…
Um…I’ve never heard of that? I like the carmelization I get from browning it in oil.
However, I do use allspice, as noted, and also bay leaves, which I think I left out. Garlic is a given, and sometimes I do add vinegar, cuz it adds a nice tang, but only do that at the end.
As someone else noted, chili can be SO all over the board, I make it several different ways, and I guess, rarely the same each time.
I try to make each chili batch a little differently, but the basic recipe is: finely chop one halapeño, one serrano, one Thai pepper and some fresh garlic. Brown some ground beef in oil, drain, add the peppers, a can of diced tomatoes, a can of tomato sauce, kidney beans, a whole lot of chili powder, some salt, then after all that cooks for a half-hour, decide what else to add by experimentation. One of my favorite dishes, and I freeze many small portions to tide me over for a few weeks.
All is dependent, of course, on what chiles you grind. With pasilla or anchos, not so hot. With chile de arbol, dried chipotles, habaneros, or pequins, you’ve got plenty kick.
Cayenne is indeed a type of chile pepper. Here’s a picture of one. Cayenne pepper is the dried, ground version of this fruit.
Chili powder is not cayenne pepper. There is a lot of confusion on this term. Chili powder, spelled that way and in American usage, means a combination of spices used to make chili. Ground chile peppers and cumin comprise the main ingredients. Some authors will use chili to refer to the stewed dish and chile to refer to the pepper. Thus, chili powder is a mix of spices for chili, while chile powder is powdered chile peppers.
Confusing enough for you? Wait, there’s more. “Chile peppers” seems to be a more modern usage. Chili, with an “i”, is the more historically common spelling for hot peppers. While I’ve never seen “chile” spelled that way to mean the dish, “chili” is very often used to mean the pepper.
Moral of the story? Chili powder, in America, exclusively (to my knowledge) refers to mix of spices. Cayenne pepper is not chili powder. Some people will say or write “chile powder” for ground peppers. I use the term “powdered chiles” to avoid confusion. Looking up the Wikipedia article for both “chile powder” and “chili powder” confirms that my explanation is correct. However, I would not be completely surprised if someone used the term “chili powder” for powdered chiles.
Cooking Geek Nitpick: I think you mean the Maillard reaction, not caramelization. Caramelization is what happens to sugar molecules when exposed to heat. The Maillard reaction is what happens when amino acids (proteins) combine with sugars in the presence of heat. Unless you’ve got yourself some ground chuck from a diabetic cow, there aren’t enough sugars in there to caramelize.
But yes, I almost always brown my beef first in oil before simmering (not boiling!) it for a few hours, unless I’m doing crock-pot chili, in which case I’ll just plunk a frozen chub o’ ground cow in there and not bother browning it first. I prefer the first method for taste, but the second for convenience.
pulykamell, that’s my understanding of the great chili/chile debate, as well. My (homemade) chili powder is, of course, AB’s chili powder , and is a different animal altogether from my cayenne powder - powdered cayenne chilis alone.
Chili with no beans is called Chili. Chili with beans is called Chili with Beans. Take a look at a can in the supermarket. Even people who make canned Chili know how to label their cans.
Chili without beans is the norm. Adding beans makes it chili with beans.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
Cooking Geek Nitpick: I think you mean the Maillard reaction, not caramelization. Caramelization is what happens to sugar molecules when exposed to heat. The Maillard reaction is what happens when amino acids (proteins) combine with sugars in the presence of heat. Unless you’ve got yourself some ground chuck from a diabetic cow, there aren’t enough sugars in there to caramelize.
Aha! I will have to place the blame on the Food Network then, mainly, Michael Chiarello (who has a hard time w/ his R’s, so when he says carmelization, it’s hard to miss!), and also, I think Rachel says it too!!!
I don’t want to get into the great chili debate (the purists will insist no beans, no tomatoes if you’re making a bowl of red, and they’re right), but the term is so widespread and has morphed so that I believe chili with beans, actually, is the norm for most people…especially in this part of the world (the Midwest). It’s nigh impossible to find beanless chili in Chicago. I was standing in line at a grill on Printer’s Row and the manager was relating to the counterperson about the guy that called asking him if their chili had beans. “What kinda chili don’t have beans in it?” the manager chuckled. I did my little bit to explain to him that people from Texas, at least, insist that chili does not have beans in it. You would have thought I told him the world was flat the way he looked at me.
I like all kinds, but I tend to go for the Texas red more than the Cincinatti put-everything-in-your-pantry-on-it type of chili.
so I picked up another almost pound of stew beef after looking at my fixins, and a 2 pound can o beans…then discovered it wont fit in my crock pot, either one. so I have a batch cooking right now for the folks at work tomorrow and I will let the other batch sit in the fridge til friday and cook it up then.
by the way thanks for the tips, this batch smells great and its hardly been cooking.
