Gravy's Cooking Thread

You get lots of sauce with angel hair pasta.

Erronius_sl said:

Deep Thoughts, with Drunk 'Ern:
2). Joeboo, I want to try your chili sometime.! I don't care if you make it with Rotel (seriously WTF mang)

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I think I've posted this here before, but it's been awhile so I thought I would share it again for those that haven't seen it. If you like chili and ever make your own, you owe it to your self to try this, you will not be disappointed. I've actually had 3 different friends now use this and win chili cookoff competitions (and people around here take their Chili almost as seriously as they take their BBQ)

First, use whatever Chili recipe you generally like & use. Some people use all meat, with no beans, some like beans, some use all fresh veggies/tomatos/peppers, some use more convenient canned items. It doesn't matter. Just make sure you have a basic starting point, as I'm not going to get into any sort of secret spice ratios or anything that complicated. Hell, use a pre-packaged chili spice pack if you want...doesn't matter.

You can use a super simple recipe like this if you want as your starting point:
Award Winning Chili Recipe - Food.com

Now, here are the key alterations:

1)However much meat is called for, make it one half beef(hamburger or steak chunks, doesnt matter), one half pork(any kind of sausage, I like ground spicy italian sausage) and then add an extra 50% of bacon. So if your recipe calls for 2 lbs of meat, you're going to do 1 lb hamburger, 1 lb italian sausage, and 1/2 lb bacon. Just keep that ratio 2:2:1

2) The first step, before anything else, however much bacon you are using, cut it up into 1-inch pieces while raw. Basically square-shaped pieces of bacon. Doesn't matter if the bacon is thick sliced, thin sliced, has flavoring(like applewood or whatever), it all works. You get out your bigass chili pot and throw all that raw chopped bacon in the bottom and cook it until it is brown. You'll end up with a bunch of crispy bacon pieces and a bunch of hot bacon grease. Fish out the crispy bacon pieces with a slotted spoon and set them aside for now, leave just the hot bacon grease. Now put ALL of your vegetables(besides tomatos) in the pan. Your onions, peppers, jalapenos, any veggie that you are using and sautee ALL of them in that hot bacon grease. Once they are all soft/translucent, pour off any excess liquid grease into a bowl/cup(the veggies will have absorbed a pretty good amount, you wont have near as much extra grease as when you started) but you do need to ditch whatever liquid grease you have left. You don't want a greasy oil slick on top of your chili.

3) Now throw that extra bacon grease in a skillet, and brown your hamburger/steak + sausage in it. Once that is browned/cooked through, drain the grease again and throw all the meat into the pot with the veggies (and add your bacon back into the chili pot too)

4) However many cans of diced/chopped/crushed tomatos your chili recipe calls for, replace at LEAST half(if not all) with equal amounts of Ro-tel(can be any heat variance from mild to hot, depending on what you prefer)

Now just follow the rest of the directions like you normally would, toss in all your tomatos/rotel, spices, etc. I also generally like to add 1 good-quality beer for good measure at this point. don't throw a goddamn bud light or coors in there, that isn't going to add any flavor, and don't put something weird in like a chocolate stout or a pumpkin beer. Put in a nice stout/brown ale/wheat beer. Something with some body to it, but a standard "beer" flavor.

Thats it. It looks like a lot when typed out here, but honestly it's only like 1 extra 10-minute long step over what you would normally do to make chili(the cooking of the bacon to start with)

Ro-tel is a brand of canned tomatos that has a small amount of onions & green peppers mixed in, and I think a small amount of some mexican chili seasoning, because you can get "hot" rotel and it definitely has some heat to it, it's more than just pure tomatoes/onion/green pepper. It's still like 90% tomato, so I'd never worry about adjusting your onion/pepper measurements elsewhere to account for any Ro-tel that you add, that's a very small amount of non-tomato ingredients being added.

I mainly like the ro-tel because it's an easy way to add some heat if you want it without having to jack with all your chili powder/cumin/cayenne ratios from your basic recipe, and the tomatos are diced up really, really small. I dislike huge tomato chunks in my chili.

lanx_sl said:

so basically carmalizing w/ delicious bacon grease. do you deglaze pre veggie or just dump it in? also i didn't know this Ro-tel is a brand of canned tomato, guess i'll look for it at Walmart, why use this brand btw?

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I have de-glazed with the beer before I dumped the veggies, that works fine but I've never really noticed a flavor difference once it is all said and done, so I don't know that it matters a lot one way or the other.

joeboo_sl said:

I also generally like to add 1 good-quality beer for good measure at this point. don't throw a goddamn bud light or coors in there, that isn't going to add any flavor, and don't put something weird in like a chocolate stout or a pumpkin beer. Put in a nice stout/brown ale/wheat beer. Something with some body to it, but a standard "beer" flavor.)

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If you can find it, Ballast Point's Habanero Sculpin is amazing in chili imo.

A local brewery around here has a green chili beer that is awesome, I've used that before with great success. Chili/pepper beers definitely work well

lanx_sl said:

so basically carmalizing w/ delicious bacon grease. do you deglaze pre veggie or just dump it in? also i didn't know this Ro-tel is a brand of canned tomato, guess i'll look for it at Walmart, why use this brand btw?

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It's a major staple in cajun food. Right behind rice. I thought everyone had heard of it.

Hekotat_sl said:

Man, I love Masala Wok's Tikka Masala (even though it's retarded expensive for Naan) and there is a little indian cafe near my work that a husband and wife run that does all you can eat stuff for lunch, it is really good.

But that sauce may be my go to for lunch type applications when I don't have time to make a full meal for the week. Thanks for the heads up!

I'm going to have to hit up more of Chef John's recipes.

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Yeah, the sauce at Masala Wok is pretty good, but that's about it. The best Indian restaurant in Dallas is India Palace on Preston/635 if you're looking for something new. I consider it "decent". The problem with Indian food is once you've had the authentic shit they sell in London or Vancouver everything else tastes meh..

Why not do it whole? Put a brick in it to make it sink.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

White and Dark need to be done separately.

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It's implied in your post, but white and dark need different temps (145 and 165). Do you have two circulators, cooler method for one, or are you going to just do them one after the other?

Spicy? Mild? Did you make enough to can? Can I come over?

lanx_sl said:

beer can chickening, a bird i brined for a day w/ sauce soy and oyster sauce. Gonna see if it works or is horrible.

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While beer can chicken tastes amazing, there is some thought that you don't want that beer can burning in your oven. Most people freak out about the plastic BPA liner but my understanding is it is actually the ink they use to color the outer can that you don't want burning up and infusing in your food.

I've taken to putting mine on the same rack you'd use for a beer-can chicken but set it in a pyrex full of beer instead of the can. Results seem equal imo.