All good advice here especially the cheap cuts of meat, fat, and slow cooking times.
A couple of my favourite additions…
Malt vinegar - goes great with beef (you can use more than you think!) - After a long, slow cook there is no vinegar flavour but it adds a certain subtle undertone to any beef dish that’ll have people guessing as to how you did it.
Ox tail - brown it in a frying pan first on a very high heat then add a little beef or chicken stock and cover. Simmer until it’s tender and let it cool. Pull the meat off with your hands and add that and any remaining stock to your chilli. The gelatine adds richness and the meat tastes amazing.
One final hint - cook it a few days in advance then freeze it for 12-24 hours. The freezing/defrosting cycle brings out stunning flavour by breaking down and softening certain cell structures in the meat and chillis.
The recipe Lift posted is similar to the one I like except I don’t use the lemon or lime.
I also add a couple of ground up chipolte peppers which give it a slightly smokey flavor.
The meat I like is london broil. You could also use chuck roast. Rough grind it before cooking or roughly chop it up if you don’t have a grinder. Let it set with some salt and pepper for an hour or two before cooking.
[quote]Renton wrote:
All good advice here especially the cheap cuts of meat, fat, and slow cooking times.
A couple of my favourite additions…
Malt vinegar - goes great with beef (you can use more than you think!) - After a long, slow cook there is no vinegar flavour but it adds a certain subtle undertone to any beef dish that’ll have people guessing as to how you did it.
Ox tail - brown it in a frying pan first on a very high heat then add a little beef or chicken stock and cover. Simmer until it’s tender and let it cool. Pull the meat off with your hands and add that and any remaining stock to your chilli. The gelatine adds richness and the meat tastes amazing.
One final hint - cook it a few days in advance then freeze it for 12-24 hours. The freezing/defrosting cycle brings out stunning flavour by breaking down and softening certain cell structures in the meat and chillis.[/quote]
The next time I make it I am going to use some oxtail.
[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
The next time I make it I am going to use some oxtail.[/quote]
It works great on so many levels.
I like to get quite scientific in my cooking sometimes and this is one of them - instead of grinding the meat which cuts across the grain I find it subtly more rewarding to pull it apart by hand which maintains the direction of the grain.
There’s a guy over in the UK called Heston Blumenthal who has been called a food alchemist. He stops at nothing to create perfect dishes.
As an example, he makes ice cream using liquid nitrogen as he discovered it works better the faster you can lower its temperature.
Sounds wacky but the guy has single handedly come up with amazing food good enough to have his restaurant voted in the top 2 in the world at least twice to my knowledge (by Michelin). http://www.fatduck.co.uk/
[quote]johnward82 wrote:
sluicy wrote:
My best chili included roasted red peppers and avacado, and I always use a can of dark beer.
I am curious of the avacado. Is it a garnish? Or used while cooking…??
Details!
[/quote]
I sliced a whole avacado in small pieces into the chili near the end of cooking time. It was a weird recipe… I made it with my husband and a friend. I’m a big fan of random ingredients, my hubby’s a big fan of beer, and my friend is a big spice fiend. So we just kept dumping all this stuff in, in a rather competitive spirit. But IMO my avacado and a jar of roasted peppers in oil were the best contribution, and I never make chili w/o celery, it adds a fresh flavor.