You have to wait for cold weather for chili?


And beans or no beans are fine. Hell, I've been known to use hominy.

BenderRodriguez said:

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ought1ag said:

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a vote for beans here.........if you like it, put it in your chili!!

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The problem isn't the beans.

It's that people who think adding tasteless legumes is a necessary thing probably screw up everything else too.

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does eating chili without beans make you more of a man?

Ragoo said:

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BenderRodriguez said:

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ought1ag said:

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a vote for beans here.........if you like it, put it in your chili!!

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The problem isn't the beans.

It's that people who think adding tasteless legumes is a necessary thing probably screw up everything else too.

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does eating chili without beans make you more of a man?

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It just makes it not chili

no beans or tomatoes.

I'm doing a cookoff this weekend using a combo Fido/Ag Chef recipe. After the hand in, I'll likely put a few pintos in.

Chili over beans and rice....

Mmmmm...

Yeah, cinci chili is basically sweet tasting hamburger macaroni.

Might as well go with chicken cubes and great Northern beans for a white chili

Think I'll mix up a batch with Nutria, ground turkey, hominy, and beans.

Gotten to where I actually prefer the taste and texture of turkey in chili.

First, if this turns into a sharing of Chili recipes the absurdity of the argument will be worth while.

Second, here is my recipe. Calls for roast but I have made it almost exclusively with ground venison recently. Have to add butter to brown the onions if you do that. I also use black beans instead of kidney beans but I'm pretty sure my grandmother didn't know what black beans were. This recipe is probably different ever time I fix it but the basic's are the same. Recently I have been using a Chipotle powder in place of the chili powder and it has a great smokey spicy taste that I like.

4 pounds boneless chuck roast, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
2 tablespoons chili powder
2 (6-ounce) cans tomato paste
1 (32-ounce) container beef broth
2 (8-ounce) cans tomato sauce
4 cloves garlic diced
1 med onion diced
1 teaspoon ground oregano
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper flakes
2 (16-ounce) cans pinto beans
salt to taste

Brown meat in a little oil and set aside leaving drippings in pan. Add Onion to drippings and brown. Add garlic and the rest of the dry ingredients and combine. Add all can ingredients and return meat to the pot. Cook over low heat until meat is fork tender.

Always used to make an authentic Texas chili for a work "cook off" of sorts (Houston). Everyone with beans always got the highest ratings which was always annoying. I get it though... beans are pretty good IN chili... it's just it's beans and chili.... not just chili.

FIDO*98* said:

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Quote:

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I'm content with a few pintos in there as their neutral flavor and creamy texture don't really change or take away from the profile of Chili. Black and Kidney beans, on the other hand, transform Chili into something else entirely which I only know as Soup.

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Which circles back to my original post about beans. It's not like it is the kidney beans making peoples chili soupy, it's that they're messing up a bunch of other stuff along the way to create what winds up being a bean soup.

Despite my posts in this thread, I'm actually pretty ambivalent about the beans themselves. It's every recipe I've ever seen from people who insist you have to use beans that horrify me with the other stuff they do.

ursusguy said:

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Think I'll mix up a batch with Nutria, ground turkey, hominy, and beans.

Gotten to where I actually prefer the taste and texture of turkey in chili.

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You're one of my favorite posters on here...but this? Damn man...sounds like a terrible waste of some perfectly good beans.

CT'97 said:

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First, if this turns into a sharing of Chili recipes the absurdity of the argument will be worth while.

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Agreed. I had some great pictures that illustrated my point on my problems with chili with beans recipes for another forum, but the great photobucket suicide of 2017 wrecked it.

I don't have a set recipe and try random stuff each time I make it, but this is a rough approximation that I cut down on pepper amounts and heat for people who don't like it spicy.

Ingredients:

Beef. NOTHING GROUND. A nice cut if you're feeling like splurging is fine, but a good chuck roast will serve just fine and be cheaper. This recipe is for ~3lbs of meat.
Jalapenos. One per pound of meat minimum. If you don't like it hot, stick with one per pound and end here. If you can take the heat, double that for the jalapenos and add
Serranos : One if you have less than two pounds of meat, two if you have more.
Habaneros: Same rule as the serranos...and both can be omitted if you don't like spicy foods...though you'll be missing out.
Onions: Prefer yellow sweet. Two of these.
Garlic: Don't cut corners and grab the canned stuff, grab a bulb.
Beer.: Something darker than Bud Light, preferably. Doesn't have to be shiner, just a beer you can't see through if you put it in a glass. Best to avoid going too dark like a porter though.
Dried Chiles:: Anchos and Arbols are the two you should grab at a minimum.
Ground cumin: no explanation needed
Salt and pepper: no explanation needed
masa harina Used to thicken/flavor chili.
Chicken Broth: self explanatory

Boil some of the chicken broth and prep the dried chiles while it warms up. Rip the stems off, open them up and dump the seeds. Cut them however you need to where they will lay flat in a skillet. In a skillet over medium heat with no oil and no spray, drop the flattened dried chiles onto the skillet. You can press lightly on them, and when they start to smoke and blister (45 seconds to a minute, usually), flip them over and repeat. Once both sides are blistered, throw them into the boiling chicken broth. Do this with all of the dried chiles you're going to use. Once you're thrown in the last chile, give it a couple minutes then take the chicken broth off heat and let the chiles sit in it.

While that sits, dice up one onion and some garlic. I use about half a bulb, but I really like garlic. If you don't, use less. Sweat the onion and garlic in the skillet in a little oil, and splash a little beer in there. When the onions get clear and the garlic is fragrant, throw about 1/2 a tablespoon of cumin on top, cook for a minute longer, then dump everything into the blender. Strain the chiles from the chicken broth, add the chiles to the blender along with some of the chicken broth they rehydrated in (2 tablespoons usually gives you enough liquid to blend the chiles well). Blend all of this and throw it into the chili pot.

Cube the meat into roughly 1" cubes, then salt/pepper the meat. Quickly sear it (better to throw raw meat in than over cook on the sear, so if you can lightly sear do that, if not just dump the meat into the pot raw.)

Dice up and deseed the jalapenos, the serranos and the habaneros (if you chose to include the last two). Also dice up the other yellow onion. I like to throw all these onto the skillet briefly before I dump them into the pot, but you can just dump them in if you want. Add enough beer/chile flavored chicken broth (at a 2/1 ratio) to make the chili pot soupy looking, and turn the heat on for the chili pot. I usually turn mine onto medium until it starts bubbling just a little bit, then drop it to simmer/low, cover it and let it sit for 4-6 hours. If you're pressed for time bring it to a good roiling boil, then drop heat to simmer and cover for at least 2 hours or until the meat is done. The longer you let it sit the better the flavors are going to be though.

20 minutes or so before time to eat, make a slurry with some beer and a tablespoon of masa harina, then add the slurry to the chili pot to thicken it up.

Sometimes I don't do fresh peppers, sometimes I try different types/ratios of the rehydrated dry peppers. I've rehydrated the dried peppers in water, chicken broth and beef broth before, but I like chicken broth the best. I'll occasionally do some chorizo with the second onion in the skillet before I dump it in too just for grins. You'll note several things that are not ever included: beans or tomatoes of any kind. Tomatoes are usually the culprit for the soupy, watery bean soup masquerading as chili that some people make. Beans are just beans and don't really matter much because they don't have much flavor or texture. The key to really good chili for me is to incorporate some rehydrated dry peppers instead of using store bought chili powder, using actual cuts of meat instead of ground meat that adds no texture, and not watering down the chili with tomatoes that overpower other flavors and turns what should be a thick, delicious meat stew into a tomato flavored soup.