Chili Beans

[antongarou]

I want to make Chili Con Carne soon, and wanted to ask a couple of questions:

1)adding beans- would it work if I simply added rinsed kidney beans to the pot at the beginning(I'm going to cook it slowly: 8 hours on low fire)?The slow cooking book I have makes it sound as if the only good method of bean cooking is rinsing, bringing to a boil, and then cooking for 30-40 minutes.

2)What spices other then dry chilli flakes and ground cumin will work well?I want to make the Chili mild, rather then spicy(otherwise cinnamon would be an obvious addition)

[MadGastronomer]

Extremely technically, Chile con Carne doesn't have beans; it's the origin of the Texan saying, "If you know beans about chili, you know chili ain't got beans." But USian chili isn't chile con carne. </excessively pedantic>

Cinnamon makes an excellent addition to a mild chili, too.

But you don't use chile flakes in chili, you use chili powder, chipotles in adobo, the adobo sauce, dried chiles, smoked chiles, and/or fresh chiles. Maybe a little lime juice, or a bottle of beer (decent, drinkable stuff, but not expensive nice stuff). But a good chili, even a mild one, doesn't need a lot of seasoning.

[Elizabeth Bear]

I'm all for garlic and onions. And oregano. and possibly smoked paprika. (in addition to various chili peppers and cumin.)

Also, the dried spices should be toasted before you build the chili.

If you're doing chili with beans, rather than chili colorado or chili verde or chili con carne, generally there's a sweet note, too--molasses or brown sugar. (Or maple syrup, if you live around here.)

But then, I *like* highly spiced, complex chili.

[antongarou]

MadGastronomer: sorry for the confusion- I thought I was using the right term.The recipe I have (Lakeland's Slow Cooking book) is about 1:1:1 ground beef:chopped tomatoes:kidney beans- and after reading your post I'm still unsure whether they'd be good after 8 hours' cooking or not. In addition could you unpack the last paragraph for me?You use some terms I'm not familiar with, adobo sauce, for example.

Ms. Bear- I like very spicy and complex stuff as well, but my SO doesn't like spicy(the woes of living with heretics..), and a couple of the guests like it but get heartburn easily, so spicy is out. How much sugar would you add to a pot based around 1 kg ground beef?

PS. I understood cinnamon stresses the spicy taste when both are present?

[Elizabeth Bear]

To taste: a tablespoon or three. I wouldn't use white sugar, though, under any circumstances.

Adobo sauce, etc, are ingredients common in Mexican or southwestern American cooking. I doubt very much you can find those things other than mail order where you are.

MG is allowing her regional bias to influence her comments. *g* In Texas, chili con carne doesn't have beans. In other U.S. states, it may, and you will find recipes for it both ways. Brady would make a disapproving noise at chili with beans; Chaz would laugh at him.

It's a religious issue, basically.

If you can't get dried whole Mexican or American chilis (ancho would be best, if you want mild chili that still tastes like chili) and I suspect that might be a bit hard to turn up where you are, any mild chili locally available will do.

As for the beans--if you soak them overnight, they shouldn't take that long to cook, and will probably disintegrate in that amount of time. If you don't pre-soak, they might still be a bit chalky.

[MadGastronomer]

As I understand it, in Mexico, the traditional form of chile con carne is a stew of chiles, meat, and maybe some tomatoes, and no beans, thickened with masa. I'm not being religious about it -- I both like and serve chili with beans -- I'm drawing a culinary distinction. US chili is not the same dish as chile con carne, in much the same way the US pizza bears very little actual resemblance to the original Italian throw-some-stuff-on-flatbread-and-bake-it pizza. US chili is highly regionalized, and beans are definitely a religious issue there. But the research I've done into the Mexican dish, which descends from a pre-European dish that is a stew of meat and chiles, tells me that Mexican chile con carne doesn't have beans. I mentioned the Texan saying mostly because it makes me laugh, and because Texan chili is closer to traditional chile con carne, in that it doesn't have beans, than most of the regional US variations.

If you slowcook your canned beans, you'll get some exploded ones, and the texture won't be optimal, but you can certainly do it.

Chili flakes -- which, in the US, is a seasoning found on the table in Italian-American restaurants and pizza places -- are not very good quality, and are not blended for optimal flavor. Chili powder is, and is generally blended specifically for chili. In Mexico, adobo is a marinade for chipotles, which are smoked ripe jalapeno peppers. You generally buy canned chipotles in adobo, and then you've both. Very tasty, but pretty spicy.

I'm not aware of cinnamon enhancing heat, but it definitely enhances meaty umami flavors, and is good in any red meat or pork stew.

[Elizabeth Bear]

Yes, in Mexico--but many of the American dishes are referred to as chili con carne, also.

[eschatonic]

oh god, chili ... *whimpers* another wonderful thing the Chinese have yet to discover.

You could use honey as the sweetener too, although personally I think maple syrup goes better with cinnamon.

I don't know where you are located, but at least in California you can also get chipotle powder, which I love to death. It's expensive, but a little goes a long way and the smokiness comes through just as strongly as the capsaicin, if not moreso. And in smoked chiles like chipotles the spice level is also rather less punchy than the unsmoked version. I've used it to add flavor to dishes that ended up not tasting peppery at all.



...edited to use English grammar and not chinglish. sigh.

[Elizabeth Bear]

I offer a Google page of chili con carne recipes as corroboration.

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=chili+con+carne+recipe

It's not authentically Mexican. But it is common terminology.

[MadGastronomer]

Common, yes, but inaccurate and unclear. To me, the distinction between the two dishes is very plain, and this is like correct use of the subjunctive or similar. It's my field, I'm being pedantic and technical about it, because that's my nature. I was trying to acknowledge that with the "</excessively pedantic>" faux-tag. Yes, in common parlance, the dish antongarou is making could certainly be called chili con carne. But this is technical language to me, and indicates a different dish.

ETA: I was delineating the difference in order to define the terms as I was using them, not as an attempt to be prescriptive about others' language. Again, I was attempting to use the faux-tag as a way to indicate that humorously. It didn't work. I'm sorry.

[antongarou]

Re: Chilis- we have locally grown chili and jalapeno peppers. how many per same pot?I assume I mince them and mix with the beef before I fry it, right?Also, reminder to Madgastronomer: I live in Israel, please do not assume we have US regional products  (we have some, like tabasco, but definitely not everything.) I don't even know what chili powder is, and why it differs from chili flakes- my spice seller carries powdered sudanese shata peppers, is that it?

Re:beans I was thinking about using dry beans instead of buying canned and then adding them to the stew- if 8 hours is too much I can add them at any stage.

To taste: a tablespoon or three. I wouldn't use white sugar, though, under any circumstances.

White sugar doesn't get into my kitchen without a very good reason(only one to date was making lemoncello:). My usual sweeteners are brown suger, date syrup and honey.

ETA: MAdGastronomer- no biggie. over here I have to explain to people that linguistics isn't about our equivalent of English lessons(called "Language" lessons).

[MadGastronomer]

Yeah, I remembered you lived someplace else, but couldn't recall where.

Hang on, I'm going to try to track down for you a clip of Brother Alton explaining chili powder. He does it better than I do.

[MadGastronomer]

OK, here and here are the two parts of the Good Eats episode on chili. The section on chili powder begins at about 4:08, and includes a recipe for making it. Just before that is a nutritional anthropologist who says I'm full of beans on the history, which may be true. *shrug* I surrender.

[txanne]

In Texas, it is very common to have two giant pots simmering on the stove: one of chili, one of pinto beans. Guests mix the two as they please. Some people add rice, but that's even worse heresy than cooking the beans in the chili! If you want a starch, use saltines or oyster crackers. (I have no idea what the Israeli equivalents would be, but you have google and a brain.)

If you don't want a lot of heat, do *not* mince the jalapeños! Leave them whole so you can remove them. Don't let the seeds into the dish; that's where the heat is.

Cinnamon is delicious, but not at all a Mexican thing. I don't put sugar [edit: or any sweetener] in my chili, ever; that's what caramelized onions are for. I brown the onions first, then the beef (ground or in chunks; it's a stylistic thing). You want more chili powder than cumin.

Here's a recipe from my hometown's spice blender: http://www.texjoy.com/store/pg/16-TexJoy-Chili-.aspx Their chili powder has cayenne, oregano, cumin, and garlic salt. Bear in mind that cayenne gets hotter the longer it sits.

[Clarentine]

Ever since we had chili served to us in Hawaii some 20 years ago, we've eaten it over rice.     My husband also likes flavor without heat, and we have had great success with the Penzey's mild chili powder; Penzey's likewise makes what I think is a superb chili seasoning, Chili 9000, which includes some cinnamon and a bunch of other good stuff.  http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeyschilipowder.html and http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeyschili9000.html will give you the run-down on both (and the other chili seasonings they sell).

Lately, instead of the rice, we've crumbled tortilla chips into the chili about 20 minutes before serving and stirred it in, for a thicker and noticeably more chili-tasting product.  Yum!