Tweet
Oh, chili. How thou dost mock me.
As many of you know, I had not one, but TWO chili cookoffs this past weekend. Having placed 2nd in my first chili cookoff and 4th in the traditional category of my second chili cookoff (the first one had no categories), I was ready to rev up the stove, try some new tweaks to my recipe (I had only made chili 3 times prior to this past week), and see if I could finally get a winner, the chili I know I'm capable of cooking.
Not so fast, my friend.
The Chili Gods, they are a fickle bunch, and not to be trifled with. Apparently I pissed them off, as SO MUCH went wrong this past week in relation to the chili.
Knowing what I know now, I should have cooked my chili last Sunday, my last full day off before the chili cookoffs. Not just to let the chili simmer for a while and then get happy in the fridge for days....but because I now know I really do need an entire day to cook chili. Silly me, I made the mistake of trying to cook chili around my busy work and volunteer schedule. Ho ho ho....what was I thinking?
So, since I work day shifts the rest of the week, I figured Wednesday would be the perfect day to do the chili. Despite my 3 hour night-time commitment when I do magic at a restaurant. Also despite my biweekly volunteer work in the afternoon. Yeah, I'm a brilliant one.
So my partner in crime and I went shopping Monday night to get all that we needed. We had recipes, we had lists. We were each making our own traditional chili (with different takes on what that entails), and we were also collaborating on a very outside-of-the-box white seafood chili. I've mentioned this here before, so I won't go into many details. We brainstormed the recipe over some beers at a local bar, were happy with it, and Friday we made it, and it came out better than either one of us could have expected. For two people who had never made white chili OR seafood chili, this was quite impressive. But the disaster was not the white chili. It was my chili. Or as I took to calling it....
Disaster Chili. (Yes, Maestro. This is where you cue the ominous music.)
Tuesday night I did my mis en place. For those of you who are not foodies, this is a fancy French way of saying "prep work." Basically, cutting up my meats and my veggies. I did this for two reasons: 1. So Wednesday I could concentrate on just cooking the chili. 2. For a guy who loves to cook, I am embarrassingly slow at cutting things up. How slow? Well, to cube up 4 pounds of sirloin steak and 2 pounds of pork tenderloin, de-case 2 pounds of chorizo sausage, dice an onion and two red bell peppers, mince a garlic bulb, trim and chop one bunch of cilantro, mince four habaneros (de-seeding them as well), and mince 16 serranos (keeping the seeds, evil bastard that I am), it took me well over three hours. Basically it took me a football game to cut some shit up.
But I must digress and discuss the pork. I use pork tenderloin in my chili. I saw at the store that it was 2 for 1, so instead of buying 2 pounds, I bought 4, sticking the extra 2 lb. package in the freezer for some later use. One small problem: it wasn't pork tenderloin. It was pork chops. A detail I didn't notice till I started cutting stuff up. "What is this bone here....aw, crap!" So my 2 lb. package of pork "tenderloin" gave me a whopping 1 lb. of meat. Fuck. So I figured I would just defrost the other package and use it as well. Problem is, they didn't defrost that quickly, and when they were finally thawed, they were....a bit soggy still. Made browning them that much more difficult.
But Wednesday came, and all was well, as I could now go about cooking, right? Riiiiight. I was looking over my notes before I started. Sautee the onion and bell pepper. Check. Add the garlic and continue sauteeing. Check. Add the hot peppers, reserving some of the serranos (and their evil seeds). Check. Add in the canned tomatoes and the beef broth. Che--beef broth?!?!? Crap! I knew I forgot something. So I had to run to the store to get my beef broth. 20 minutes down the drain.
So, first step? Oven roast the bacon. But since I had twice as much bacon as usual, I had to cook it on two cookie sheets instead of one. The two sheets wouldn't both fit on the same rack in the oven, so I simply put one on the bottom rack, thinking that I might have to cook that one longer, since it was further from the heat. It's really amazing sometimes how naive I am. See, for some reason (and maybe someone can explain it to me), the bottom sheet cooked MORE, and when I pulled the bacon out of the oven, the top sheet was perfect, and the bottom sheet was....crispy. Very crispy. Some of the bacon was beyond crispy. It was practically ash. Plus, when taking the bacon out, I somehow started a small flame in the oven. The electric oven. (Later, when cooking something else, I would cause a small flame to come from one of the stove burners. The electric stove burners.) To add to all this, I planned on using the bacon grease to brown up the steak and pork tenderloin. When pulling the bacon from the oven to cool, I lost a lot of the wonderful bacon grease by somehow spilling it on to the stove top.
As if that wasn't enough, after I got the sirloin steak browned and in the big pot, I go to cook the pork tenderloin in the same skillet....without letting the grease get back up to speed, OR thinking that I might want to ditch some of the grease to give the pork more chance to cook. But no, the pork went into grease not nearly hot enough (and I hadn't tested it, as I always do), so instead of getting browned pork, in essence I got oil-poached pork. Lovely.
Finally, I get everything cooking, adding in all my secret and not so secret ingredients, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why the concoction in the pot is so liquidy. It never was like this before. I figure I'll just simmer it down for a while, and it will reduce, right? Riiiiight. Didn't happen. It simmered for hours, and was still bizarrely soupy. I figured I'd work on it the next day, but for the moment, it was late at night, it was time to put it in the fridge and go to bed. The taste was there, after all, just not the thickness.
So the next day at work, I was thinking it over, wondering what I had done different. I had followed all my usual steps, and while I used different beer, I had kept the ratio of all the ingredients to each the same, other than leaving out the beans......
Of course! Not only did the beans take up space and fill the chili out, they absorbed a whole lot of liquid. What a moron I was to make such a basic mistake when reworking the recipe. I did not adjust the liquid ingredients to reflect the lack of beans.
So, what to do? I could add more tomato paste. That would kill off some of the spice I had so arduously worked up. (The lack of beans DID make the chili much spicier, much to my delight.) I could add more meat, but that would get expensive, and I was so NOT adding ground beef to my sirloin chili! I could add flour or corn starch to thicken it, but I'm not a fan of corn starch, and I wasn't sure if flour would do the trick. I could try straining off some of the liquid, but all that flavor in the liquid....how could I pitch that? And that is when a coworker of mine suggested straining off the liquid, reducing it over heat, and re-adding it to the chili. I looked at her in wonder. Brilliant! Genius! And when I got home from work, I went about doing that. And the liquid was taking some time to reduce, so I went to my room, drinking beer and watching tv, and checking on the reduction from time to time.
Dozing off while you are reducing something on the stove is generally a bad idea. It might cause it to over-reduce down to a scorched....something in the bottom of the pot, covering the pot and the wooden spoon in it in black, smokey, crusty, crunchy carbon. Not to mention setting off the apartment's smoke detectors. Which is what caused my roommate to bang on my door to wake me up. Yeah, Mr. Anti-Social was NOT amused. The place smelled of nothing but smoke. Not good smoke, either. Acrid smoke. Foul smoke. The kind that gets roommates pissed and neighbors calling the fire department. (I was spared that last humiliation, thankfully.) Took me over 20 minutes to clean that pot. The wooden spoon didn't make it.
Frankly, with all that went wrong, I was shocked I didn't cut one of my fingers off, burn my stomach on a hot pot, or accidentally neuter my neighbor's house cat.
So, with all of the above going on, it's no wonder that at Saturday's cookoff, I was referring to my chili as "Disaster Chili." It seemed to fit. But, much to my delight, people loved my chili (and the white seafood chili), and while I didn't win, the Disaster Chili actually placed 3rd out of 14! Added bonus: the white seafood chili placed 5th!
Added vindictive bonus: the guy next to us was kind of an arrogant douchebag, claiming that in the 35 years he had been cooking his chili, he had never once NOT won a cookoff he had entered. That's right, he claimed to be undefeated. He said a lot of other shit, too, that grated on my nerves, as well as Cookie's. Well, he didn't win this one. He didn't even come in second. He came in 14th. Out of 14. (I am friends with the lady who ran the cookoff, so I found this out later.) That brought a huge smile to my face.
I didn't place in the Sunday chili cookoff, but the Disaster Chili story has a post script. Shortly before we were done, my friend and cooking partner Cookie somehow managed to accidentally knock the pot of White Seafood Chili off its burner, on to the table. Tilting at an angle, the lid from the pot fell off the pot, off the table, and on to the brick walkway. The glass lid. Yep. You guessed it. It shattered.
All in all, despite all the trauma and drama, I learned a lot, and plan to use it for the next batch of chili. I am this close to making the chili that I really want, and have several ideas for how I am going to achieve it next time. Smoke detectors be damned.
As many of you know, I had not one, but TWO chili cookoffs this past weekend. Having placed 2nd in my first chili cookoff and 4th in the traditional category of my second chili cookoff (the first one had no categories), I was ready to rev up the stove, try some new tweaks to my recipe (I had only made chili 3 times prior to this past week), and see if I could finally get a winner, the chili I know I'm capable of cooking.
Not so fast, my friend.
The Chili Gods, they are a fickle bunch, and not to be trifled with. Apparently I pissed them off, as SO MUCH went wrong this past week in relation to the chili.
Knowing what I know now, I should have cooked my chili last Sunday, my last full day off before the chili cookoffs. Not just to let the chili simmer for a while and then get happy in the fridge for days....but because I now know I really do need an entire day to cook chili. Silly me, I made the mistake of trying to cook chili around my busy work and volunteer schedule. Ho ho ho....what was I thinking?
So, since I work day shifts the rest of the week, I figured Wednesday would be the perfect day to do the chili. Despite my 3 hour night-time commitment when I do magic at a restaurant. Also despite my biweekly volunteer work in the afternoon. Yeah, I'm a brilliant one.
So my partner in crime and I went shopping Monday night to get all that we needed. We had recipes, we had lists. We were each making our own traditional chili (with different takes on what that entails), and we were also collaborating on a very outside-of-the-box white seafood chili. I've mentioned this here before, so I won't go into many details. We brainstormed the recipe over some beers at a local bar, were happy with it, and Friday we made it, and it came out better than either one of us could have expected. For two people who had never made white chili OR seafood chili, this was quite impressive. But the disaster was not the white chili. It was my chili. Or as I took to calling it....
Disaster Chili. (Yes, Maestro. This is where you cue the ominous music.)
Tuesday night I did my mis en place. For those of you who are not foodies, this is a fancy French way of saying "prep work." Basically, cutting up my meats and my veggies. I did this for two reasons: 1. So Wednesday I could concentrate on just cooking the chili. 2. For a guy who loves to cook, I am embarrassingly slow at cutting things up. How slow? Well, to cube up 4 pounds of sirloin steak and 2 pounds of pork tenderloin, de-case 2 pounds of chorizo sausage, dice an onion and two red bell peppers, mince a garlic bulb, trim and chop one bunch of cilantro, mince four habaneros (de-seeding them as well), and mince 16 serranos (keeping the seeds, evil bastard that I am), it took me well over three hours. Basically it took me a football game to cut some shit up.
But I must digress and discuss the pork. I use pork tenderloin in my chili. I saw at the store that it was 2 for 1, so instead of buying 2 pounds, I bought 4, sticking the extra 2 lb. package in the freezer for some later use. One small problem: it wasn't pork tenderloin. It was pork chops. A detail I didn't notice till I started cutting stuff up. "What is this bone here....aw, crap!" So my 2 lb. package of pork "tenderloin" gave me a whopping 1 lb. of meat. Fuck. So I figured I would just defrost the other package and use it as well. Problem is, they didn't defrost that quickly, and when they were finally thawed, they were....a bit soggy still. Made browning them that much more difficult.
But Wednesday came, and all was well, as I could now go about cooking, right? Riiiiight. I was looking over my notes before I started. Sautee the onion and bell pepper. Check. Add the garlic and continue sauteeing. Check. Add the hot peppers, reserving some of the serranos (and their evil seeds). Check. Add in the canned tomatoes and the beef broth. Che--beef broth?!?!? Crap! I knew I forgot something. So I had to run to the store to get my beef broth. 20 minutes down the drain.
So, first step? Oven roast the bacon. But since I had twice as much bacon as usual, I had to cook it on two cookie sheets instead of one. The two sheets wouldn't both fit on the same rack in the oven, so I simply put one on the bottom rack, thinking that I might have to cook that one longer, since it was further from the heat. It's really amazing sometimes how naive I am. See, for some reason (and maybe someone can explain it to me), the bottom sheet cooked MORE, and when I pulled the bacon out of the oven, the top sheet was perfect, and the bottom sheet was....crispy. Very crispy. Some of the bacon was beyond crispy. It was practically ash. Plus, when taking the bacon out, I somehow started a small flame in the oven. The electric oven. (Later, when cooking something else, I would cause a small flame to come from one of the stove burners. The electric stove burners.) To add to all this, I planned on using the bacon grease to brown up the steak and pork tenderloin. When pulling the bacon from the oven to cool, I lost a lot of the wonderful bacon grease by somehow spilling it on to the stove top.
As if that wasn't enough, after I got the sirloin steak browned and in the big pot, I go to cook the pork tenderloin in the same skillet....without letting the grease get back up to speed, OR thinking that I might want to ditch some of the grease to give the pork more chance to cook. But no, the pork went into grease not nearly hot enough (and I hadn't tested it, as I always do), so instead of getting browned pork, in essence I got oil-poached pork. Lovely.
Finally, I get everything cooking, adding in all my secret and not so secret ingredients, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why the concoction in the pot is so liquidy. It never was like this before. I figure I'll just simmer it down for a while, and it will reduce, right? Riiiiight. Didn't happen. It simmered for hours, and was still bizarrely soupy. I figured I'd work on it the next day, but for the moment, it was late at night, it was time to put it in the fridge and go to bed. The taste was there, after all, just not the thickness.
So the next day at work, I was thinking it over, wondering what I had done different. I had followed all my usual steps, and while I used different beer, I had kept the ratio of all the ingredients to each the same, other than leaving out the beans......
Of course! Not only did the beans take up space and fill the chili out, they absorbed a whole lot of liquid. What a moron I was to make such a basic mistake when reworking the recipe. I did not adjust the liquid ingredients to reflect the lack of beans.So, what to do? I could add more tomato paste. That would kill off some of the spice I had so arduously worked up. (The lack of beans DID make the chili much spicier, much to my delight.) I could add more meat, but that would get expensive, and I was so NOT adding ground beef to my sirloin chili! I could add flour or corn starch to thicken it, but I'm not a fan of corn starch, and I wasn't sure if flour would do the trick. I could try straining off some of the liquid, but all that flavor in the liquid....how could I pitch that? And that is when a coworker of mine suggested straining off the liquid, reducing it over heat, and re-adding it to the chili. I looked at her in wonder. Brilliant! Genius! And when I got home from work, I went about doing that. And the liquid was taking some time to reduce, so I went to my room, drinking beer and watching tv, and checking on the reduction from time to time.
Dozing off while you are reducing something on the stove is generally a bad idea. It might cause it to over-reduce down to a scorched....something in the bottom of the pot, covering the pot and the wooden spoon in it in black, smokey, crusty, crunchy carbon. Not to mention setting off the apartment's smoke detectors. Which is what caused my roommate to bang on my door to wake me up. Yeah, Mr. Anti-Social was NOT amused. The place smelled of nothing but smoke. Not good smoke, either. Acrid smoke. Foul smoke. The kind that gets roommates pissed and neighbors calling the fire department. (I was spared that last humiliation, thankfully.) Took me over 20 minutes to clean that pot. The wooden spoon didn't make it.
Frankly, with all that went wrong, I was shocked I didn't cut one of my fingers off, burn my stomach on a hot pot, or accidentally neuter my neighbor's house cat.
So, with all of the above going on, it's no wonder that at Saturday's cookoff, I was referring to my chili as "Disaster Chili." It seemed to fit. But, much to my delight, people loved my chili (and the white seafood chili), and while I didn't win, the Disaster Chili actually placed 3rd out of 14! Added bonus: the white seafood chili placed 5th!
Added vindictive bonus: the guy next to us was kind of an arrogant douchebag, claiming that in the 35 years he had been cooking his chili, he had never once NOT won a cookoff he had entered. That's right, he claimed to be undefeated. He said a lot of other shit, too, that grated on my nerves, as well as Cookie's. Well, he didn't win this one. He didn't even come in second. He came in 14th. Out of 14. (I am friends with the lady who ran the cookoff, so I found this out later.) That brought a huge smile to my face.
I didn't place in the Sunday chili cookoff, but the Disaster Chili story has a post script. Shortly before we were done, my friend and cooking partner Cookie somehow managed to accidentally knock the pot of White Seafood Chili off its burner, on to the table. Tilting at an angle, the lid from the pot fell off the pot, off the table, and on to the brick walkway. The glass lid. Yep. You guessed it. It shattered.
All in all, despite all the trauma and drama, I learned a lot, and plan to use it for the next batch of chili. I am this close to making the chili that I really want, and have several ideas for how I am going to achieve it next time. Smoke detectors be damned.
I read your post outloud to my husband, and we both got a good laugh out of it. I'm sorry you had such a rough time with everything!
)
Eric the Grey
Comment