Life, in Particular

Need work; made chili

By Kevin Steel ⋅ October 29, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Lost my job. Boo-hoo. If you have one and you’d like to give it to me, contact me at kwsteel -at - shaw.ca. But enough about that. Let’s make some chili!

Yes, chili con carne, a nice and easy way to ease back into the blog. And easy, you know, does it. It’s a cold autumn day and the low gray sky overnight has spilled onto the frosted gray ground and grass. It’s one of those days where you want to fill up the house with warm, comfort food smells. Everybody knows how to make chili. Everybody makes it differently. And everybody believes they make the best. The basics are, er, basic, and yet a few personal modifications yield a complex, individual flavour. It’s a slow cook so there’s little chance of burning it. It goes great with beer. You can put cheese and sour cream on your chili to fancy-pants it up and impress your friends. You can go Texan and make it with just meat and hot sauce. (But most of us go with kidney beans.) Chili is a great side dish. Have it with a main course of a bratwurst on a bun, for instance; much better than baked beans. Of course, chili con carne can be macho if you make it really spicy. You can eat it cold, you can heat it up. You can freeze it for later. Best of all, you can have it for breakfast, lunch and supper on the same day and enjoy every meal.

It’s one of the first big dishes a young man cooks when he moves out of the house. I myself learned about it really early in life, first encountering a basic chili recipe when I was eight or nine, in a Homer Price novel I think. (I can’t recall which one so don’t quote me.) My favourite 1970s TV detective Columbo would eat chili for breakfast, with crackers, and I thought that was so cool. Chili is a social dish, with the chili cook-off getting its own Wikipedia entry, no doubt written up by someone from the Chili Appreciation Society International, Inc. Simpsons fans will recall the brilliant episode which featured a chili cook-off and a foxy Johnny Cash.

Let’s start with tomatoes. I like my chili with a nice tomato flavour, so keep that in mind as you read this and modify your own. At the beginning of October, I moved to nice quiet house on the other side of town and inherited a disheveled garden that hadn’t been weeded or watered over the summer, the vacating owners having reasoned no doubt they would not be here for the harvest, so why bother? In the back of this garden were six overloaded Roma tomato plants. So, here I’m using fresh tomatoes. Usually, it’s canned tomatoes. If I’m using canned, a general rule of thumb is; add slightly more canned tomatoes than canned kidney beans. Tinned tomatoes are usually bigger than the cans of kidney beans, so it just a matter of one-to-one; a bigger can of tomatoes to one can of kidney beans. If you want to get fancy and blow the budget, go down to your Italian market and grab a few tins of Strianese brand “San Marzano Tomatoes of Sarnese-Nocerino area” [sic, from the label] with basil, at $4.50 a can–it sounds outrageous but it’s worth it. Canned tomatoes are not something I would normally eat right out of the can, but to my complete surprise I discovered these ones I will, just like my Italian grocer said I would.

But now, as I said, I’m using fresh Roma tomatoes; more flavour and they look pretty cool when they are chopped up and in the pot, which is why I started photographing this little project in the first place. That pot is about 4.5 litres in size, btw, an Imperial gallon.

Into the tomatoes, dump in a couple of cans of red kidney beans along with whatever that slimy goo is that comes in the can with the beans. I used two 19-ounce cans here.

Turn on the stove at this point to start the pot’s slow cook, set at “Low” or just above. Plunk on the lid.

Next I chop up onions–about three or four slightly smaller than a baseball. Chuck ‘em in. Do not bother to cut uniformly. This is a homemade chili and the more irregular the chopping, the more homemade it will look and taste. So just hack away. Eventually, as the chili cooks out the smaller onion bits will dissolve, so it’s good to have some bigger onion pieces hanging around for variety in flavour and texture.

Following onions, it’s time for garlic. Here’s how much I use; too much for your average person, I’m told, and not enough for garlic freaks. Peel it, chop it up and throw that in. Stir.

I like to add tomato paste to my chili even when I’m using fresh tomatoes. For this recipe I dumped in a couple of those small five and a half ounce cans. Hunt’s sells a 13-ounce can of tomato paste, but that might be too much.

Now mushrooms and meat, ground beef. Mushrooms, I have been told, contain an enzyme that aids in the digestion of beef and that is why they are served with steak. I never looked that up. I add mushrooms because they are my canary-in-the-coal-mine, my flavour spies on the inside. As the chili slow cooks, the mushrooms give off a lot of water, and after they’ve done that, then they start absorbing flavours around them. So I watch the mushrooms. When I think the whole thing is done, the first thing I taste is a mushroom. If it has flavours, then the chili is good to go. Chop up the mushrooms and stir them into the pot.

Throw in some chili powder. How much? Your call. I would say for a pot this size at least a cup. I used a cup and a half. If you want to start experimenting with heat, chop up some fresh chili peppers and heave ho into the mix. Careful though, this is the trickiest part, the heat. If you sprinkle in crushed peppers, chances are you are going to add too many because when they cook out, look out. Expect to be experimenting all your life with peppers. Expect to kill yourself with peppers. This time around I didn’t add any because I didn’t have any. For heat, I used something called Ogopogo Sauce, a concoction I bought at a craft fair in town, and I added it to the bowl after the cooking was done, when I was shoveling it into my face.

But back to the pot. After whipping in the chili powder, give the raw mix a little taste. The chili powder you used probably contained a lot of salt (check the label). Now, on top of the mix sprinkle on some crushed black pepper and maybe some salt, again to taste. I tossed in a bit of Kosher salt which I use for cooking all the time because that’s what the TV cooks use. Buy some. Makes you feel like a pro. At this point, you’re probably saying to yourself, oh-oh, I’m going to need a bigger pot, and you may be right. However, as the heat builds, things start to break down and the level lowers, more so if you used fresh tomatoes. Put the lid back on and turn to the meat.

Pour some cooking oil–I used olive oil–on the bottom of a frying pan. Flip the heat up to medium-high and slap the ground beef down on the oil. Your purpose here is to “brown” the meat and cook out some of the water and fat.

Stir it around and when the meat turns “brown” (actually gray), drain the water and fat off and dump the meat into your pot. Stir it up.

You slow cook with the lid on for about an hour, stirring occasionally. Then cook it with the lid off for another hour to reduce the water content. Flavour-wise, if you go the tomato route and find it’s too tart, throw in some brown sugar. But not too much, no more than a small handful.

And there you go–(I’m addressing my always hungry teenage nephews “teach a man to fish” etc.), your own big pot of chili!