I’ve been trying to make the perfect chili, and while chili cook-offs aren’t very popular in Canada, I think I’ve come very close. Since I want it to be healthy as well as delicious, I encourage the use of beans, onions, vegetables and encourage any mysterious ingredients that will improve the overall bowl of red.
I started with a decent recipe from 2011 Cooks Illustrated and improved it with a bunch of added ingredients and a better mix of dried Mexican peppers for the homemade chili powder.
But looking on the web for secret ingredients to add the final je ne sais quoi revealed a host of things I don’t think would help, or which would not be as good as what I’ve already used.
So pass on peanut butter, fish sauce, soy sauce, vinegar, bacon, nopales. Ambivalent about coffee or espresso powder. A clear yes to freshly smoked and ground dried chiles, cocoa, fresh jalapeños, sriracha and several ingredients so secret that… well, I can say the only two people in the world who can procure them aren’t permitted to travel in the same vehicle.
But everyone has their own preference for great chili. So what ingredients make the best bowl? And which ones should never be added by decent people?
Chili is one of those dishes that everyone makes correctly. You’re the only person who needs to be happy with your specific interpretation and the haters can go do something biologically improbable.
With that being said, a bowl of red should be a simple affair. Good beef chuck stew chunks, a selection of three or more peppers to add depth of flavor and complexity, tomatoes, onions, garlic, a bit of salt and masa to thicken. Serve with cornbread and a longneck lager - it doesn’t need to get more complicated than that.
This reminds me of a news story I read years ago. A guy went to a chili cook-off and got samples from all the entrants, mixed them together, and entered the mixture in the competition without telling anyone what he’d done. He won. When people realized they hadn’t seen him cooking, they took the award away from him and gave it to someone else.
What I think happened was that each legitimate entrant had special ingredients to make their chili stand out. When the entries were all mixed together, the special ingredients were minimized, and the predominant flavors came from the ingredients that the recipes all had in common. The judges liked it because it tasted like chili, not like an exotic stew.
I’ve never tried jalapenos. However, you might like to use a Habanero pepper, in addition to sweet green peppers and onions. Even better if you can find a “Burning Bush” pepper, which is a variety of Habanero–it’s not more or less hotter, but it is a little sweeter. Gives a pot of chili a nice kick. I grow Burning Bushes every summer, and use them in my chili.
My ex-wife liked to use a couple of dashes of “Pickapeppa sauce,” which, if memory serves, was like a spicy Worcestershire sauce. It’s (present tense, because I’m assuming it’s still available somewhere) from Jamaica, so you might find it in West Indian groceries in Ontario. I’ve never seen it here in western Canada. Anyway, if you can find it, you might want to give it a try. I could always take it or leave it, but she loved chili with a couple of dashes of Pickapeppa sauce in it.
Old Bay seasoning is my favorite add-in. The family are allover the place about spicy heat from peppers so I make it on the mild side. I always have pepper sauce(my own mix) and other hot sauces for those that like the heat.
Chili is just a spicy beef stew, play around with it and soon you’ll have your own “secret” recipe. Having said that, it’s a simple dish, so the quality of the ingredients is very important.
Most recipes should be simple affairs. But the difference between something delicious and something deplorable isn’t always big. No special ingredient is going to save a bad recipe.
That said, I hadn’t heard about the mixing story, which is amusing. I’ve never been to a chili competition. Our town does have a rib festival, and I’ve often wondered about the rules - the ribs are almost always perfectly smoked and cooked but the sauces (even among the winners) are always fairly bland and very similar in taste and style (slightly spiced ketchup, never North Carolina, Korean Kansas style or something sweet and spicy like habanero and pear). To compare entries and please the unadventurous, this must be some sort of rule.
While there is much blast and blathering about great chili (just a beef stew), my recipe does have five sensible secret ingredients that I have not seen elsewhere (in Internet chili recipes or on Serious Eats). And they rock. You want to lick the bowl clean. I’d put my chili up against any I have ever eaten. That said, I haven’t tried Jim B’s grandmothers recipe and in cooking there is usually much to be said for simple recipes and quality ingredients.
The simple ingredients listed by Alpha Twit would make a good chili. Adding a bottle of lager to the meat and a few teaspoons of cocoa powder would make a very good chili. Beer is welcome, I prefer other sides to cornbread.
1967:
It started as a publicity stunt to promote Tolbert’s book and Shelby’s West Texas real estate schemes. Hence Chili. It pitted two cooks against each other: the good guy, Wick Fowler, versus the bad guy, Allen Smith. It was all a big goof and declared a draw when one of the judges scorched his taste buds. The next year masked bandits stole the ballot box and threw it down a mine shaft. That kind of thing. Each new year brought more cooks, more rules, more bickering.
If you’ve never, you need to read up some about Terlingua. Here’s Molly Ivins on their fence climbing contest…from 2006.
Try putting cubes of the raw meat in a food processor in small batches and pulse it a few times. Don’t overdue it, you don’t want a paste or a grind consistency. You want a bunch of irregular chunks of different sizes. When you cook it down you get some meat in every bite but sometimes it’s tiny flakes, sometimes it’s big meaty chunks and sometimes it’s fall apart little bits.
It works best for leaner cuts of meat. (I developed the technique for substituting boneless skinless chicken breast in soups and stews)
I like to use a mix of ground beef (usually chuck) and hand-cleaved short ribs, myself. And the tip about blooming spices mentioned above is one I follow as well. I don’t really have any “secret” ingredients. The spices are generally cumin, various powdered chiles (I’ll usually use Hungarian sweet paprika and ancho as the base , build up with guajillo and/or New Mexico red, and then for the real heat, something like arbol or the dried Thai red chiles I have from my garden. If I want a little smokiness, throw in some chipotle in there, as well. The paprika has a nice “sweet red pepper” flavor with no heat; the anchos are somewhat raisin/prune-like in their flavor, a little bit fruity and earthy, but mild; the guajillo steps up the heat a tad (but at most mild-to-medium) and adds its own complexity with berry-like notes and more earthiness; then to take it up another level in heat, I accent the heat with the arbols or Thais if I want it even hotter. You can bring it up even another notch with habaneros, but I’m not entirely sure I like the flavor of habanero in chili. I mean, I’m a sucker for jerk, and I make mine melt-your-face-off-hot, but I just don’t like its tropical frutiness in chili.
I also sometimes use pasilla, morita, dried tabasco peppers from the garden, etc. The basic idea is to layer flavors together. Fresh fruit, dried fruit, earthy, grassy, heat, and smoke (if you want it) together.
Then Mexican oregano … what else … I usually will put in garlic and onion powder, but not always. I’ll sometimes add a hint of clove for a spice accent. But, otherwise, I keep it simple. There’s nothing unusual in my spice choice.
I like a blend of meat in my chili. I like both ground and chunk since I think the different textures help make it more interesting. I also primarily use fresh or roasted peppers and use almost no powered or dried peppers.
A typical recipe would look like:
1 pound beef stew meat
1 pound pork stew meat
1 pound lamb stew meat
2 pounds jimmy dean spicy sausage
2 pounds roasted hatch chilies
2 pounds jalapenos
1 pound pablenos
3 large red onions
5 tablespoons of chopped garlic
20 oz of rotel tomatoes
16 oz of kidney beans (drained)
16 oz of pinto beans (drained)
3 beers preferable porters
Two large handfuls of Fritos
For spices I stick to mainly paprika, cumin, salt, and pepper
