Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Chili: The Results Post
That third picture is more to show the bread I bought than for another angle on the bowl of chili that could properly keep a spoon standing upright. I saw wheat Italian bread cheap at Hannaford and it looked so yummy I bought a loaf to go with the chili. The bread turned out to be merely okay; not fine enough to be like white but different, and not strong enough to be strongly flavored wheat. Plus for all Hannaford make great baked goods, I think Wal-Mart’s addictive white Italian bread is probably better than theirs, giving the wheat an automatic strike against it.
I think the chili would have been great served with injera, which I’d love to try making someday. It may not be Ethiopian, but it’s similar to the types of dishes served on or with the flat bread.
But I digress.
The chili came out near perfect. Deb says it’s the best she’s ever had. I say near because I know it could be improved slightly, but it was damn close. Sadie enjoyed it, though mainly she picked the meat chunks out. But they were the bulk of it anyway.
Monday night was when I’d planned to make it, with Deb having pre-cooked plain a bag of pinto beans. I was late enough and we realized it would take long enough and the beans were abundant enough that we changed plans. I drained a lot of the water from the beans - more than I probably should have, it turned out - and scooped aout two cups, perhaps a third of the total. I made those into refried beans, a first for me. They came out pretty good.
I’d also overbought the steak, already expecting to make something else out of part of it, or so have even meatier chili than I did, so I cut off half of one of them and stuck it in the cast iron pan with spices. It sealed the outside and left too rare the inside, despite and maybe because of my efforts to cook it fast, so I ended up cutting it into small strips in the pan as it cooked. It wound up being the most amazing flavored steak I have ever made. I could barely keep from eating it all before it got into the burritos. Which is what we made, with the homemade refried beans, steak, cheese and sour cream. They were yummy! And I can’t get over how cheap. It was maybe $2 for the entire meal that left us stuffed.
Meanwhile, I cut the rest of the steak I’d opened into small chunks. After we ate I cooked them in the cast iron pan along with a clove of garlic and almost half each of a green bell pepper and large Vidalia onion. Tossed that into the bean pan and then cooked the other, larger steak, cut up in small chunks, with a bunch of spices, cooking until the meat was done and the liquid was concentrated. That went into the pot.
Stirred and simmered and spice and flavored. I used a dash of apple cider vinegar, a large can of tomato paste, probably about the same as two of the traditional tiny size, and ultimately ended up adding some ketchup, a fair amount of water, and both white and brown sugar. At one point all you could taste was concentrated bell pepper and it was very bitter, so I ended up doing an unusual amount of adjusting the other way. And repeatedly adding chili powder to get that flavor component to come through correctly. That was the main spice, but along the line it also had red pepper, black pepper, garlic powder, cumin, cilantro and ginger (unless I am thinking of the burrito steak), and cinnamon (in the anti-bitter phase).
In the end it tasted similar to my old faux chili, but thicker and meatier. It wasn’t as hot as I have sometimes made the faux chili, or at least the heat was covered well, but it was delicious. As I noted elsewhere, Valerie loved the taste of the sauce, and Sadie declared it good in the face of fussy eating lately.
Doing it the night before worked out perfectly, too. It cooked until something like 10 PM, then went in the fridge sometime after 11, after enough of a cooldown.
The chili experiment was so successful it’ll probably be a semi-regular thing, especially in the winter as it’s that sort of hearty.