It’s Chili Time, Arctic Explorers

When I was growing up, my favorite writer was Blackie Sherrod, a sports columnist in the old Dallas Times Herald, and later in the august and serene Dallas Morning News. Blackie said that you should always wait until after the second hard freeze to make chili. And that’s all well and good, but I live in New Jersey, and we’ve already had our first snowfall, and I have time NOW to make chili and write about it. And there’s a polar vortex coming, don’t you know. So I’m going to jump the gun a little bit.

ASSEMBLE YOUR CHILI.

The Meat

This particular chili I am making today has three meat ingredients:

1. Two pounds of smoked beef brisket, cubed

2. One pound of lean ground beef

3. One pound of ground pork

Now, I am not doctrinaire in your meat selection here. I made some venison chili last year, and it was delicious. I have no objection to using turkey if you want that. I like ground turkey in chili just fine. If you want to use stew meat and just stew meat, and have the patience to cook your chili until the stew meat breaks all the way down, go for it. What I’m doing here is making a chili that’s half-chunky and half-not, because that’s what I want to go for here. What you want to do is sear your meat, get it nice and cooked with a lot of crusty bits, and then throw it in your chili pot and cover with your chili liquids:

The Liquids

What I am using here is:

1. One bottle of Shiner Bock, because Texas

2. Two cans of generic store-brand tomato sauce

3. An equivalent amount of water (empty out the tomato sauce can into the chili, fill it up with water from the sink, empty out the water into the chili).

Basically, you want to have enough water to cover the meat, and to distribute your chili spices:

The Spices

I put in chili powder (a whole bunch of it), cumin, paprika, and salt. If you want to put in something spicier, by all means do it. (I am sharing my chili with my wife, who is not a big fan of hot and spicy food, so I have to moderate the spices in the recipe.) By all means, add in cayenne pepper, or sriracha sauce, or Tabasco, or habanero anything, and whatever the hell else that floats your boat. (I happen to like putting sweet-pickled jalapeno slices in mine.) Once you have all the spices stirred in, cover your chili, let it cook on low, and walk over to the stove.

The Extras

What I did this time was to dice up a Vidalia onion and caramelize the living hell out of it. I caramelized that onion the way that I want God Almighty to caramelize Jerry Jones’s black heart in Hell. Then I tossed it into the chili. I have no idea how this is going to turn out and don’t care because it’s going to be beautiful, you guys.

Right this minute, I have about fifteen jalapeno peppers sitting in the oven that I’ve dry-roasted and I am going to give serious consideration to dicing at least some of them once they’ve cooled down a bit. I don’t know if they’ll go in the main chili just yet, or just my bowl–I’ll need to taste-test it a bit.

At some point, yes, I am going to put some masa in the chili to thicken it a little bit. If it gets too thick, I have a can of Ro-Tel that I’m going to use to thin it out a bit, and add some more flavor to the equation.

So that’s it. The beautiful chili is in my Crock-Pot right now, simmering. The connective tissues of the brisket are breaking down ever so slightly. The spices are integrating with the liquids. Nothing to do but wait. And there’s nothing else, not one thing, that needs to be added right now. Nothing.