Yeah, a friend of ours is hosting a Super Bowl party with a chili cook off as part of it. You’d better believe that I’m going for the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink variety of chili rather than a purist bowl of Texas red. While I do enjoy the latter quite a bit, it’s a matter of know your audience. Around here, Midwestern styles of chili dominate, with plenty of beans in the mix, and often corn and other vegetables (although potatoes, sweet or not, I’ve never seen.) My plan is homemade chili powder and paste, a few aromatic spices like cinnamon or even cloves, a mix of meats (including chorizo, ground beef, and grilled–or posisbly lightly smoked–chuck cleavered into small dice), a mix of beans, possibly corn (I’m on the fence on that one), and masa harina or tortilla chips for thickener.
My other idea was the anti-vegetarian chili, trying to see how many different dead animals I could fit into a bowl of chili. Czimer’s is not too terribly far from me, so I could fit a whole lot of different animals, if I wanted to.
Okay, since we are all being reasonable, I have a question…I’ve never dared to ask because people get so overwrought about chili sometimes.
If you serve the purist-type chili, which I understand is purely meat and spice, what do you serve with it? When I make kitchen sink chili, it’s got meat, tomatoes, onions, beans, sometimes potatoes (really, you should try it!), sometimes pasta on the side. Add crackers or peanut butter sandwiches for the kids to dip, and you have a meal.
So what to do with a bowl of chili meat? It’s kind of like a bowl of sloppy joe meat–I feel like I’m missing something. I’ve never eaten meat-only chili, so I’m curious.
Usually a side of cornbread (for the love of all that’s good in this world, not sweet cornbread), or warm tortillas with a side of beans. If you want to get ghetto with your purist chili you can serve it with Fritos or some other corn chips and cheese to make a sort of high quality Frito pie. This is probably not quite the way Cowboys ate it but it’s awesome.
Also, the only sloppy joe meat I’ve ever had was ground, if you’re making ‘purist’ chili you’ll want chunks of beef. If you really want to go the extra mile you should smoke the beef before you add it to the chili. You don’t want to cook it through on the smoker, just 45 minutes or so of low heat and hickory or oak smoke to give it flavor. It’s a bit of extra work but it’s so, so worth it.
The most perfect batch of chili I ever concocted contained moose. The whole 3 gallon batch was eaten directly from the cookpot, scooped out with Fritos and tortilla chips. Great stuff - I think it actually bubbled the paint over the stove.
Peanut butter sandwiches? With chili? Child Protective Services will be calling on you shortly.
For what it is worth, based on a recipe I learned here for a hot sauce, I add a cup or two of cold coffee that is left over in the coffee pot. It adds a certain earthy flavour, also a healthy dash of Malbec.
ETA - only works with beef chillis, not sure it would go with the chicken sweet potato one described.
Sometimes when a chilli fails to spark, it just needs cooling and standing over night and reheating the next day.
The flavor of chili powder is pretty much THE major flavor of a bowl of chili, along with beef. It’s almost a contradiction in terms to say that chili tastes too much like chili powder. That’s like saying ice cream tastes too much like cream!
I think what you’ve run into is that you have a lot of relatively non-intense and non-traditional ingredients (sweet potato?) that might not bring a lot of anything flavorful to the party, or in the case of the sweet potato, might taste downright weird in conjunction with the other flavors.
I’d garlic it up, and add a dose of fish sauce, anchovy paste, or just straight up MSG since it sounds to me like it might be pretty low in umami type tastes.
I think you’ve got it sorted by now, but maybe something smoky? Some bacon? Maybe some smoked paprika? Beer could be nice, too, to add a bitter note to the sweetness of the potato.
All right, y’all stop making fun of my sweet potatoes. It’s an experiment!
I think someone nailed it–it really just needed to be put to bed overnight. Well, it needed more tomato too. Consider if you added a dash of chili powder to tomato juice and drank it right away–as opposed to letting it blend for a while. That’s how it tasted–sorta not-quite-done.
Now, the peanut butter sandwiches: I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense to me either, but every school I or my children ever attended and/or taught at served peanut butter sandwiches on chili day. Kids being kids, they learned to dip (gah) their sandwiches IN the chili, and I’ve never seen such bliss on a child’s face as when they eat that combination. Go figure.
That being said, I’m kind of partial to peanut butter and crackers with my chili. But I’d eat peanut butter and crackers with any main dish, so there ya go.
Personally, I feel that bacon is a positive addition to anything. As is tequila. Can’t go wrong with either, as an ingredient or a side dish. Or an entire meal, for that matter.
It’s an experiment!