I grew up in Houston, Texas. Back in those days, even Houstonians were serious about Texan culture. And so, for about as long as I've been seriously cooking, I've been working on my Texas chili recipe.
So what's Texas chili? I'm sure even Texans could disagree on this matter, but let me tell you all about mine, which is delicious. First of all, I don't even use ground beef for chili anymore. Secondly, there are no beans or fresh peppers or chiles in my chili. Traditionally, Texas chili is made from beef, though I have made some delicious chilis from chicken and pork both.
Don't use ground beef for chili, unless you have a lot of time (or a very, very large skillet, roughly 4 feet in diameter) to brown the meat. The delicious, toasty-roasty, meaty flavor of good chili depends on the browning of the meat. Ground beef doesn't brown properly; it tends to boil in its own juices because there is almost always too thick a layer of it in the pan. Instead, use cheap whole beef, such as stewing meat, chuck, inside round. If you want to make a special chili and spend a little extra on the beef, flank steak makes good chili too. This time around I used short ribs, but we'll get to that a bit later.
Texas chili is a cowboy chili, and so it was usually made with preserved ingredients. That means it's a 'red' chili, made with chiles which are red or brown in color because they've been dried. For 2-4 pounds of meat, I use one whole ancho, one whole chipotle, and two arbol chiles. I don't measure anything, so it always comes out a little differently, and for home cooking I like that.
That being said, I put the chiles in my spice grinder along with roughly a tablespoon of whole cumin, and a generous tablespoon of oregano flakes. This gets burred up to a nice powder. We'll use it a little later to make the gravy, or sauce, that is the wet part of the chili.
I use cast iron to make my chili. There is a marked difference between the flavor of chili made in stainless steel versus cast iron, even if I make it. So in my cast iron dutch oven I heat some oil and a saute one or two diced onions. Meanwhile I heat the cast iron skillet, and set about cutting up the meat.
I want largish chunks, bigger than bite size, but maybe two-bite-size. It's nice if there is some fattiness to the meat, but if you use flank steak or something else lean, you'll have to add a small amount of fat to the pan. Withmy short ribs, I cut the strips between each pair of bones, and sometimes I cut sections between the bones, so that I could have more, slightly smaller chunks, to make more servings. Salt and pepper these pieces, and then sear them on all sides, getting them nice and brown. I usually have more pieces than will fit in the pan at one time, so as they get done I move them to the dutch oven.
In the dutch oven, once the onions have been suitably sauteed (they should be barely brown, mostly soft, it's not critical), I throw in 3-4 chopped cloves of garlic, stir onces, and dump in a large can (28 fl.oz. / 796ml) of whole stewed tomatoes. I throw the powdered spice mix on top and stir that in before I start adding the meat. I usually also chop the tomatoes in half with my spatula at some point so that they will break down a little more during the cooking process.
So, as you get done searing all the meat, the tomatoes will be starting to simmer around the chunks in the dutch oven, and once all the meat is added you can put the lid on, perhaps leaving it open a crack, and let it simmer really slowly for a while.
How long is a while? At least two hours, really. Any less than that and the flavor of your chili will not have time to develop. If you're using a tough meat, which you should be to make chili, you should really let it cook a good four hours. Making chili amounts to braising, which is where my original inspiration to make chili from short ribs originated. Another interesting cut to make chili from, which I have yet to try, would be shank. That would require an even longer cooking time, but it would produce a very rich, unctuous, sumptuous chili.
Because of the long cooking time, some of the pieces will break apart as the chili cooks, since you'll be checking on it every 30 or 45 minutes and stirring it gently to make sure it doesn't burn on the bottom, etc. This is one of the reasons for cutting larger-than-bite size pieces: when served, the chili is most appealing if there are some hearty chunks of meat in a delicious sauce. A far cry from potentially soupy, homogeneous, gruel-like chili made from ground beef!
As the chili gets toward being fully cooked, it's a good idea to taste it and make sure everything is okay. Adjust the seasoning with salt, perhaps pepper, Tabasco sauce, Worcestershire sauce, or the like. Once it's done cooking, I usually let it cool overnight in the refrigerator and finish the next day. This isn't necessary, but it does taste better the next day, and it's easier to skim the fat off the top when it's cold and solid.
I don't throw the fat away, unless there is a huge amount. Instead I melt it in a skillet and make a roux with it and some corn flour. When the roux's had a chance to cook some, I then put the chili on top of it and heat it all up, mixing the roux into the gravy and possibly adding a little water if it's too thick. The corn flour thickens the gravy even further, and also gives it a distinctively southwestern flavor. The chili will taste fine without it, but it reminds me of home to include the corn flour, so I usually do.
These days, I serve my chili on top of or next to a simple lettuce salad, the greens just washed and slightly seasoned with salt and pepper. I top the chili with fresh diced onion, grated cheese, and sour cream. On the evening when we had the short rib chili we had no sour cream, and I didn't miss it. In honor of the short ribs, I used grated Beemster XO, a long-aged gouda from Holland, which is delicious and richly aromatic, and somewhat reminiscent of the more traditional cheddar-style cheese typically used in Tex-Mex cuisine.
I took a photo of the finished product, but I am really unhappy with the quality of the image. The camera is a really cheap one, an impulse buy, and it seems it won't be suitable for food photography for this blog. If I can clean it up enough, I will post it.
