Hardware:

A slow cooker.
A large pot or frying pan. I like a pot because there's less spashing onto the counter/stove.
A collander or other way to strain & drain beans.

Ingredients:

1 ~560ml / 19oz can of each of red and white kidney beans, and navy beans, or rehydrated dried beans, or fresh, whatever you have. Feel free to substitute your favourite beans.

1 ~830ml / 28oz can of diced tomatoes, or diced fresh (keep the juice), or chopped dried tomatoes rehydrated. Plain or "Italian seasoning" ones are fine.

1 medium or large onion. Yellow, white, red, whatever you like.

A pound or two of ground meat. Cheap meat is fine; it'll be slow-cooked so tougher meat is fine. For variety, don't use the same type as below. I usually use beef, but turkey works great.

A pound or two of solid meat - beef stew chunks, chopped pork chops, whatever you can brown in a pan. Chop it into pieces, thumb-sized or a little smaller. I like using pork. Again, cheap cuts are fine.

Seasonings:

Salt
Fresh-ground pepper
Garlic (minced from a giant Costco jar is my favourite easy way, but you can use fresh and peel it and chop it - powdered will do in a pinch if you have nothing better)
Onion powder (not onion salt)
Dried ground chillis or chopped fresh ones - I use ancho, chipotle, and smoked paprika
Tabasco sauce
Aromatic bitters
Dry mustard
Oregano

2/x

#ingredients #hardware #prep #preparation

Prep:

Put the slow-cooker on low, lid on.

Open the cans of beans. For each one, pour into the collander over a sink. Then run cold water over every millimeter of them. Shake them around to expose the parts that are touching each other. If you can flick it to bring the ones on the bottom to the top without spilling them all, do that. Keep rinsing until every bean has had every part rinsed *good*. Drain and pour the beans into the slow cooker and put the lid back on. Repeat for each type of bean.

Why? This is the beans-and-gas thing. The part of the bean that can give you gas is indigestible proteins that they contain. Your stomach can't break them down, so they go through and end up fermenting, basically, in your intestines, producing gas.

The trick is that these indigestible proteins are only on the *surface* of the bean. Not in the beans themselves. You rinse & shake & rinse & rinse the beans, and none of that indigestible protein ends up in the dish to start with, and you don't get gas.

Start heating the pot/pan over medium heat on the stove. Chop the onion, medium to fine. Add some cooking oil to the pot/pan. Throw in the garlic, minced. Add salt fairly liberally. Then fry and stir until the onions are starting to caramelize. Throw it all in the slow cooker.

3/x

#beans #gas #flatulence #protein #indigestible #IndigestibleProtein #ferment #stomach #intestine #garlic

Empty the can of tomatoes, including the juice, into the pot. You don't need to drain or rinse it first. Add much of the seasonings except the sauces here, and stir them in. Put the heat up to medium-high, and get them bubbling pretty good.

Stir occasionally and cook the tomatoes down until most of the liquid is gone, reducing the heat gradually as the liquid is removed. They'll start to sizzle rather than bubble. That's good; you're caramelizing the tomatoes. Don't go overboard; they shouldn't brown, and there should still be some liquid in the bottom of the pot. Then pour all of this into the slow cooker.

In the pot, cook the ground meat using medium heat. Apply salt, pepper, oregano, and whatever else you like while doing this. Periodically break it up and stir it. You don't need to brown it. When it's basically cooked, pour it in the slow cooker. If you used really fatty meat, drain most of the liquid fat off the pan before adding to the cooker. Leave some for the next step if you have any!

Add oil to the pot if there's not enough fat left, more garlic, and throw in the cubed meat. Add salt, pepper, oregano, dry mustard, onion powder. Flip and shake them a bit. Let these brown some. They don't have to be cooked all the way through; the slow cooker will finish the job. Pour everything into the slow cooker.

Dash tabasco over the contents of the slow cooker, amount depending on your heat preference. Add several dashes of the bitters.

4/x

Using a big spoon, turn the contents of the cooker over a little to mix it up and distribute stuff a bit.

Put the cover on, and leave it in the slow cooker on low (not "warm", if yours has that setting below "low") for a couple of hours. No stirring required.

After 2 hours, use a spoon to taste a bit of it. Try to get a couple of beans and a bit of ground meat at least. This is just to check seasoning. If it's bland, add more of whatever you like. If it's not hot enough, add more Tabasco, or cayenne, or other pepper sauce. Turn the contents a bit after adding seasoning. Then, drizzle a little vegetable oil over the top, and put the cover back on.

Leave it to cook another 2 hours, minimum. I actually like to do the part up to here in the evening, and leave it to cook all night. This gives the flavours time to meld and distribute, etc.

Near the end of final cooking time, optionally drizzle maple syrup (the real stuff, not fake) over the contents of the slow cooker. Do not turn the contents, just re-cover and leave for at least half an hour. More is fine.

Throughout this whole process, you can substitute whatever seasonings you want. The chillis are part of what makes it chili, but you can use different ones, more or less of them, etc. I personally think oregano flakes are a must, but you can use whatever you like. If you're using poultry, maybe you want rosemary and thyme or something.

5/x

#delicious #savoury #HintOfSweetness

Serve with buttered buns / rolls / bread / whatever. I like something crusty, with a tooth to it. If you use Wonder Bread, you will shame your ancestors.

Now, what do I mean by "real" chili?

What I don't mean is the stuff from chili competitions that's all meat, where beans get you disqualified. (See: Texas, etc).

Chili came out of the cowboys of the American southwest. It's what they could make out in the middle of a million acres of grazing land, one or more days' ride away from anything resembling civilization. Out for weeks at a time. No refrigeration. No expensive ingredients. Nothing that would spoil.

So what could they take? Dried beans. Onions. Tomatoes, fresh for the first few days, dried for after that. Basic seasonings: salt, pepper, mustard maybe, garlic.a bit of other herbs.

What they *didn't* have was a lot of meat. You might bring a few chickens along, but you weren't eating a lot of beef. The ranchers didn't like cowboys who came in with fewer cattle than they went out with. Maybe you'd shoot some jackrabbit or squirrel or coyote or something once in a while, and there would be a bit of meat for the chili. But the bulk of it was always beans.

You could also find wild chilis here and there. Or maybe you splurged and brought some dried ones. Added a lot of flavour.

Ten pounds of meat cooked with a ton of spices and chilis may be good to eat, but it sure as hell ain't related to chili.

6/6

#shame #ancestors #Texas #cowboys #herd #beef

@cazabon

I like your suggestion of cooking down the tomatoes. Sometimes, I add a few spoonfuls of cocoa powder (the stuff in the baking aisle). It doesn’t make the chili chocolaty; it sort of mellows things out.

BunDad and I tend to dine on the living room couch. And he likes to eat his chili with flour tortillas. We had a rabbit, Lily Bunny, who adored flour tortillas. She was so sneaky about stealing them off of BunDad’s plate. She would grab one and carefully run away (so as not to trip over her tortilla). We’d let Lily have a bite ;)

#chili #bunnies