How do you make Chili?

Cooking Discussions Cooking, Cookbooks, Ingredients
102

I used the Wick Fowler mix for a couple of decades after first discovering it while in grad school at UT Austin. I scooted the cart right over to the meat department and ordered a couple of pounds of round, chili grind.

I got tired of it after a couple of decades and started playing with the mix for a few years then tried the Carroll Shelby but eventually just made my own mix from scratch. I came up with a mix that included 5 chilies, ancho, guajillo, at least one chipotle, and 2 others that varied. I quit after achieving perfection :star_struck: about 15 years ago with a couple of rather uncommon chile varieties, one of which I had to grow myself.

For a few years now I’ve just been relying on store bought chili powder mixes - Penzey’s hot, Cin Chili

(the owner/founder lives a couple of miles from me) and Terlingua, which I discovered only a couple of years ago.

https://www.heb.com/product-detail/casi-terlingua-tx-championship-chili-recipe-mix/2147837

Recently, though I’ve been interested in old fashioned Chili con Carne as served at early Tex-Mex restaurants - the earliest chili recipes were all very simple, usually just with one chile - ancho.

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103

Chili totally varies at my house, just depends on what’s to hand, and mood. Typically, it’s a bowl of red, sometimes with beans, sometimes not. Occasionally it’s white chili, so in that case use navy or cannelini beans. Typically in the red chili’s, I like a pinto bean or variation of that. My very favorite chili’s don’t include beans at all, I make them on the side. Getting ready to make a fresh brisket chili which calls for OJ, allspice, chili’s, etc. - really good, but no beans, ever, just on the side. For nostalgia, we sometimes make my H’s mom’s chili, which she added carrots to - but it was good! The only constant at our casa, there’s AlWAYS cornbread. Oh, and I’ve never liked the version of chili with kidney beans and green pepper. Basically grew up with that and yuck. BUT, whatever floats your boat!

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104

Mine is more about expediency than effort, but it works for us. Puts a low effort meal on the table that everyone likes. I always start with a sautee of chopped onion, bell peppers, and a jalapeno. Once they are softened, I add my protein. A pound of gr beef, gr turkey, or soyrizo. Then I toss in, by eye, some smoked paprika, some paprika, some cumin, salt and pepper. Maybe a smidge of garlic powder. 3-4 cans of assorted beans whatever I may have. I like to mix black and kidney. 1-2 cans of diced tomatoes. Cover with a couple of inches of water and let it simmer slowly for a couple of hours. Serve with diced raw onion and crumbled tortilla chips on top. The active time is about 15 min on this, and it’s mostly opening, emptying, and rinsing cans.

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105

Ok this thread is apparently heckin old. I hope that if you feed peeps outside your family you let them know. In case of allergies. I won’t forget the very first daycare my son went to. He is peanut anaphylactic. They gave us a tour before we enrolled, and they were so proud of their culinary graduate on site chef who cooked all the food for all the babes. He told us they all loved his spaghetti, where he secretly snuck in some pb into the sauce. Well, after our heart attack (never sneak allergens into anything), we had to educate him and all the center employees about why they shouldn’t and why it was dangerous for their charges to do so. Your comment brought these memories up, as the kid in question is currently 19!

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106

Edited so it’s not just to Miss belle bc I read down and saw a whole bunch of you adding peanut butter. Oy.

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107

Nice thread there @bbqboy !

I certainly love me some braised oxtails, short ribs, chile verde, stuff like that, but to me chili means ground meat.

much depends on what I have handy cuz it can be sorta odds and ends stuff in a good way…things i really like in my chili include

ground beef
ground venison/moose/boar/elk (stuff my hunter friends throw into my freezer or theirs)
breakfast sausage (not the links, the ground stuff from butcher or in a tube)
fish sauce/anchovies
vindaloo paste (from jar from supermarket)
ground dry chiles and related spices
cumin
szechuan pepper (corns) ground up
whole can or jar of pickled jalapeno rings and the juice
whatever hot peppers fresh and dry i have
left over little plastic things of salsa, hot sauces and chili paste from various takeouts can make their way in depending
beer (some for the pot)
tomato paste/canned tomato
sometimes beef stock if i have some
garlic/onion

on the side could include:

pinto beans, black beans – not everyone likes em, and they can get soggy in a huge batch that i want to reheat, save, etc.
green onions
shredded cheese
tortilla chips/fritos/tortillas
dave’s insanity sauce (or the like) to kick up the heat on a bowl by bowl basis. dipping a chopstick in usually gets the amount needed.
hotdogs/buns
cornbread

i really enjoy the process of a one pot meal, cooking it, drinking while i cook, watching the game, having leftovers cuz made so much

some great tips up there – squirt of hershey syrup i like that!

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108

I use Dutch cocoa, same idea. Like corvette, I just start whipping stuff together. For me, the soft celery is what makes it, though. Must have. Corn bread is the other must. I never found Alton Brown that entertaining; but love his cornbread recipe.

109

You’ve encapsulated the beauty of chili making very nicely. I’m with you. It’s a meal the deserves a beer, wine, mixer while making it. For me, the Badgers or Packers on TV.

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110

I love certain sauces with peanut butter, but this is why I’ve never added it to chili, despite hearing it was a good idea… So many eating it, someone’s bound to have the scary allergy. Issue the warning load and clear, if you have it in there.

111

Celery goes well with so much stuff. Always in gumbo I’ve never used in chili. I’ll throw some in next batch ! I’ve had a lot of fun last few decades with my patriots but I think it’s our time in the barrel for a while. Here’s to a fun football season !

112

Always! No secret ingredients when you aren’t feeding your own. :slight_smile:

113

For me one main “must” in chili is to have a large diversity of chiles/pepper. Besides black pepper and regular chili powder (like McCormicks), I’ll add some powdered chipotle, a little cayenne, some regular and smoked sweet paprika, and dried New Mexico, ancho, and chile de arbol. (This is for a “red” chili - for a “white” chili like chicken chili I use white pepper and try to find as many varieties of green chiles as I can get.)

This is not to get it super spicy hot, necessarily, but I find it just adds a lot of depth of flavor. It might be just my imagination, but I’ve had people who barely know me come up at work potlucks etc. and mention similar. My sister visiting once with her family was very direct about it, because her husband’s chili is mono-dimensional habanero habanero habanero. But if I do want it hotter I’ll add some habanero or increase the amount of one of the hotter chiles (but not increase cayenne - if I get too much of that one it seems to stand out too sharply).

Other than the above, most of the time my chili is pretty freewheeling as to the rest of the components, but I do like to have a variety of beans, 3 or 4 types (normally canned because I can’t usually bestir myself to bother thinking about dinner early enough to soak).

About a month ago I followed a recipe from Serious Eats. Kenji wrote that he’d been asked to review someone’s “seriously best ever chili” (paraphrasing) recipe for an upcoming cookbook, and what he posted on SE was his improved version of that one. The main differences just from a basic style were a fair bit of chocolate, as many mentioned above, 4x more cinnamon than I normally use, and about 3x more nutmeg (I usually won’t use more than a gram or so in a gallon of chili).

I thought it was pretty good except that half the called for cinnamon would have been better. Not one of my kids or wife got seconds, which was a bad sign. They didn’t like the chocolate in it (but still next time I’m sneaking some in, just not as much) and especially thought the cinnamon was way overboard.

Now, all the above is for “sit down for a big bowl of chili” type chili. I also make a Cincinnati style chili for chili cheese dogs, but that’s more of a spiced ground beef sauce than anything. Except I can’t abide the idea of leaving all that fat in there so instead of boiling the ground beef straight off, I brown it first and defat.

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114

Gumbo needs it. With the okra, they make beautiful music.

Try it in chili, just make sure is has no tooth left in it (for my textural pleasure, anyway.)

115

I save my cinnamon for apple pie and not much else !

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116

Yeah! Same here. I make a big bottle of chile sauce every two , or so, weeks. I go to a store that will have their “leftover” peppers for $1 for like a couple pound. Whatever they have, I’m saucing a whole mess of it. So my chili changes per the peppers I get there.

I love the floral nature to habaneros; but there’s so much more out there. maybe some aji if it lands in my pepper bag, since we’ve been chatting about those yellows so much.

The chocolate works, IMHO. I think the cinnamon killed it. I brown as well.

Not looking for heat so much as pepper flavor.

117

Completely agree. I think the pickled jalapeño rings can give it a little okra magic in chili but maybe I’ll just toss in some okra too I really like it a lot.

118

The texture of okra is something you love or hate. I adore that sliminess.

Good idea with the pickled jalapenos. Gte some of that pickled zip from the escabeche.

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119

On another thread someone said we need a chili thread with fall drawing near. We already have “How do you make your chili,” but it is a few years old and with all of the newbies here from CH, I thought it might be fun to start fresh.

My recipe: cut a brisket into one inch cubes and brown them in bacon fat with some diced onions. Add a good bit of New Mexican red chili powder, a little cumin, a little Mexican oregano, some salt, and some heat. I like ghost peppers or habaneros. Both have great flavor and add a wonderful zing. Add a few glugs of bourbon and enough vegetable broth to enable you to simmer it. Tighten it with masa if you must, but I don’t add that step.

This is the definitive accompaniment (assuming you have beer and cornbread and just want a little relief from the heat) to very hot chili. I learned it from an El Paso chili head. Yeah, I know it sounds weird.

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121

You’re right about beer and cornbread @Vecchiouomo I like your recipe too.

Here are my pearls of something…

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133

If your grocer stocks Fiesta spices, they have a good selection of dried chilis and chili powders. McCormick’s is solid, but I find the Fiesta offerings more fun (and often cheaper). We go through a lot of Fiesta cumin, NM chili powder, dried arbols, dried cascavels, and dried anchos, and steak seasoning.

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