Several years ago my brother sent me a big bag – maybe a pound – of chili powder. After many uses, I’m now down to .99999 pounds of it. And several days ago, my niece sent me another pound of it.
I’ve already made chili this month. What else can I do with it?
Let’s get those recipes rolling in.
You can roast some of it to get a different flavor. You can soak it in oil to make chili oil (although probably not as good as from fresh peppers). You can coat meat and vegetables with it before cooking. Basically, you can make chili flavored things, or add tiny amounts to other dishes calling for some chili pepper or other hot peppers.
But you really aren’t using enough in your chili if you’ve only used .00001 pounds so far. That’s about enough for 1 drop of chili.
Missed the edit window. Rough calculations show that’s not enough for 1 drop of chili.
Take some nice thick New York strip steaks and coat both sides with chili powder. Place them on a platter and drizzle good olive oil over them. Cover the steaks with plastic wrap and refrigerate for a few hours. Then take them out, bring them to room temperature and grill them over a charcoal fire. This is how they do steaks at Cafe Pasqual’s in Santa Fe. Delicious!
You can do the same thing with a nice rump roast, lamb chops, or rack of lamb.
I swear I put about half a pound in, but there was still a pound left over!
I like the steaks idea. I don’t have a grill, but maybe I could broil them.
BBQ Sauce. You have to be creative with this, as I don’t really have a recipe. But I’m fairly certain I could mix together a combination of:
Chili Powder
Some sort of acid - lime juice, vinegar, whatever
Some sort of sweet - brown sugar, molasses, honey, whatever
Salt or Soy Sauce
Garlic / Garlic powder
Water
Bring to a simmer over low heat and keep tasting/adding stuff until it tastes good.
I’ve never thought of making BBQ sauce with chili powder. And I have all of those ingredients!
Queso! Even if you don’t like it, just make this when you’re going over to somebody’s house and they’ll act like you’re the messiah.
Melt down a pound of Velveeta (I know) and whatever tasty cheeses you have in your 'fridge along with a can of Hormel no bean chili. Then, season to taste with the following: cumin, cayenne pepper, regular pepper, and chili powder. Seriously, use WAY more chili powder than you think you’ll need-- much more than the other ingredients.
Finally, throw in a squirt of yellow mustard-- I know it sounds crazy, but it makes the queso perfect.
If things are a little thick, add in some milk.
If it helps, here’s my recipe for spicy BBQ sauce. I tend to like it less sweet and more acidic, and this is made with dried chiles & chipotles. I’d leave those out and sub in the chili powder instead. I’m thinking maybe 1/4 cup or so of chile powder, depending on how hot and/or salty it is.
1.5 cups water
1 shallot
2 big garlic cloves
2 canned chipotle
1 dried ancho chile
Soy sauce
1 T. Brown sugar
Molassas
Juice of 2 limes
I saute the shallot & garlic, then add the water, chipotles, and ancho & heat until the ancho is soft. Then I blend it in my blender, put the mix back on the stove, add the rest of the ingredients until it tastes the way I like it. I might let it simmer some if it seems too watery.
With the chile powder, you can probably skip the blending step.
(and if someone does make this, you probably have to put the blended mixture through a fine sieve to get out the chile skins, unless you have a high-end blender like a Vitamix or Blendtec).
I’m with the dry-rub idea, but do they really grill it with a good amount of the spices still out there? It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a nice strip steak (the king of steaks, next to ribeye, IMO), but I’d hesitate to use a really choice beefy cut like that like that. I’ve always found the spices kind of get charred and a burned flavor on various sub-strip-steak cuts.
I think the key is probably not “coating” the meat, but making sure enough of the spice intromits into the cut, helped probably by oil and the salt (added or in the powder).
A few pounds!?! That’s so much spice OP will never get through it within a decade or two. I’d just use it to flavor rice, and maybe make a nice sauce. Never tried this, but maybe make a concentrated “essence of the chili” sauce which can be diluted at will whenever it’s needed. Probably freeze the concentrate, though, if it were me. I love the chiles, but cumin every single meal can get overpowering for me, even though it’s the basis of all good spice mixtures (albeit in less quantity, proportionally, than found in an average chili powder).
Wait, I think I’m a boner – clarification needed. Is this straight pulverized dried chiles, or is this “chili powder” (the sort with cumin, salt, maybe paprika, garlic and/or onion powder, etc. added)?
If it’s the latter, then that’s what I was thinking it was. If the former, then make everything in your kitchen spicy as all get out, and please don’t hesitate to dry fry it in a skillet to get some of those smoky undertones. Vodka, olive oil, babies, mother in law’s coffeemate – everything spicy!
Tacos! Burritos!
I tend to use a lot of it when I make fajitas.
Speak for yourself. I’m forever running out of chili powder, and I buy at least a half a pound at a time. Even if all I do is make chili out of it, we eat chili quite a bit (easy to throw together + healthy + Mr. Athena makes it = we eat it a lot), and can easily go through 1/4 cup (or more!) per batch.
Chili powder rocks.
You know those “romantic” nights that involve stuff like strawberries and liquid chocolate and you know…
I saw one similiar video using Chili powder and Pabst Blue Ribbon…
blend with cream cheese. have on crackers or bread.
make surprise cookies.
I’d be happy to send you some. 
The first thing I would do is throw out the old chili powder. It will lose it’s flavor relatively quickly, and you might as well use the new stuff rather than FIFO it so that you are always using the old.
I assume your brother is in New Mexico. If so, what you have is ground chili pepper rather than chili powder. If so, try the red chili recipe on [this](nmchili.com Chili Sauce)site. Just serve it as a “gravy” with eggs, on pork, with beef, etc.
I’m cracking up over the “surprise” cookies!
Truthfully, though, a small amount in a chocolate cookie/cake/candy/ice cream/muffin recipe is pretty damned good!
Oh, and hot chocolate!
~VOW
Correct on both assumptions. Same with my niece.