# What goes great with football??? Well chili of course. Check out this recipe...



## DrSooS (Oct 12, 2012)

Okay.
So, I know this is not a sport but who doesn't like chili with their football? Am I right?
Here is a recipe I found some time ago, and with a few tweaks, additions and omissions we have what you see here.
So now, on with the show.


2 x 28 oz. Cans of Crushed Tomatoes &#8211; _*If you grow and can your own tomatoes and tomato juice, by all means use them.*_ 
2 cans tomato sauce 
1 can tomato paste 
1 can tomato juice or spicy V-8 whichever you prefer. 
2 28 oz. Can of Brooks Chili Beans - one mild one spicy 
Green Bell Pepper 
Poblano Pepper 
Minced Garlic 
Sweet Onion 
1 lb Roll of Bob Evans Zesty Hot Sausage 
Round Steak appx 2-3 lb _*The sausage and round steak can be omitted and replaced with *__*ground beef.*_ 
Worcestershire Sauce 
Tabasco Sauce 
Liquid Smoke 
Chili Powder 
Ground Cayenne Pepper 
Ground Coriander 
Salt and Pepper 
Cumin 
1 -2 Tbs of beef base 
1-2 Tbs of chicken base _* I use beef and chicken base but you can use broth instead probably between 1/2 and 1 full cup each. 
*_ 
All of this can be purchased for around $25.00 USD and will feed about a dozen once, or a family of four for 3 days.
*Preparing the Chili*




 Go ahead and chop those peppers. I don&#8217;t go too crazy in trying to get everything uniform since chili is a pretty rustic dish, but you do want them relatively small and manageable pieces. You can just use green bell peppers if that&#8217;s all you have, but I really like to use one bell, and one poblano pepper.



 The same goes for the onions. Again, uniform size isn&#8217;t all that important because they will really soften up after cooking and be virtually shapeless anyway. I really like sweet onions for this for their milder flavor. Of course, go ahead and use whatever kind you have on hand or prefer. In this case, I used one large onion that weighed in a little over a pound. If you&#8217;re using smaller onions, you may want to use a few. I&#8217;d say after all said and done, it was around 3 cups.



 Once you have your onions and pepper chopped, go ahead and mince up about 6 cloves of garlic. Then, throw everything into a big bowl. I have to stress the fact that it needs to be a _big _bowl, because not only are you putting all the veggies in here, but you&#8217;ll also be adding all of the meat and mixing it together for marinating a bit later.



 Chop the steak into about half inch cubes. I typically find that round steak comes in big flat slabs that are around 1/2 inch thick anyway, so it&#8217;s easy enough to cut it into strips, and then cube it crosswise. As seen above, that is only about 1 pound of the 3 pounds total that go into the mix. It can take a little time to get through all of the chopping for this recipe, but your patience will be rewarded.



 Once you add the chopped steak to the big mixing bowl full of onions and pepper, you&#8217;ll want to take the roll of sausage and break it up into pieces. At this point you&#8217;re not looking to do anything special with the sausage other than make it easy enough to work with. Don&#8217;t go and throw the whole log right on top since that will make your mixing job that much harder. Just break it up into pieces with your fingers.



 Now comes the fun part! To your meat, onion, and pepper mixture, it&#8217;s time to add the seasoning for the marinade. To the bowl, add a few large pinches of kosher salt. I prefer kosher salt myself, but whatever you have is fine. If you are using regular table salt you may want to use less. Then, add a teaspoon or so of black pepper. For me, that&#8217;s about 20 turns on my pepper grinder. Now it&#8217;s time for the liquid components. We&#8217;ll be using both the liquid smoke and the Worcestershire sauce. No exact measurements here, but I&#8217;d guess about 4 or 5 tablespoons of Worcestershire and maybe 2 tablespoons of liquid smoke to start. Then, dig in with your hands! You need to thoroughly mix everything together. After you get things pretty mixed, you can determine if you need to add any more liquid. You don&#8217;t want a soup, but you want it to be moist and have everything covered. You can see from the image above how mine turned out after mixing everything together.
Now, we wait. Cover the bowl, and throw it in the refrigerator overnight if possible. You really want the flavors to get into the meat since that is the heart and soul of this recipe, but if overnight won&#8217;t work, you can probably get by with 4 hours. The longer you&#8217;re able to let it sit, the better it will be. I know, the smell that this mixture has created will fill your house with some of the most amazing aromas ever, but you&#8217;re just going to have to wait.
*Cooking the Chili*




 After the mixture has had time to marinate, it&#8217;s time to begin the actual cooking. To make this process go as quickly as possible, I use the same pot I cook the chili in to brown the meat mixture. The pot I use (not the smoking kind) is a 3 gal stainless steel pot. Along with the largest skillet in the kitchen. Remember, we&#8217;re working with nearly 4 pounds of meat and about 4 or 5 cups of vegetables. Even with a large skillet, it is impossible to brown everything in one batch. I know what you&#8217;re thinking, but don&#8217;t even try it. If you cram everything into the pan, you&#8217;re not going to speed anything up. It will take even longer to cook, and you&#8217;ll end up basically steaming the meat. So, work in batches. I have a 12-inch skillet that I used here and it took 2 batches in the skillet and 1 batch in the pot. Each batch took about 7-10 minutes on medium-high heat. We&#8217;re not too concerned if the meat is 100% fully cooked since it is going to go into a pot and simmer for a few hours.




 As your meat begins to brown, you&#8217;ll find yourself with something that looks like the picture above. Notice the liquid that&#8217;s coming out of the meat and veggie mixture. This is good! The last thing you want to do is to cook it so long that you boil this all away. You do want to have it reduce a little bit as to make sure you don&#8217;t end up with soup instead of chili, but this liquid that&#8217;s been extracted from the onions, peppers, meat and marinade is flavor that you can&#8217;t get anywhere else. So, it goes right into the chili pot.




 Once all of the browned meat is dumped into a big pot, you can add the entire can of chili beans. I insist on Brooks, but you can use whatever brand you happen to have. Then, add almost one entire can of crushed tomatoes. We&#8217;ll probably end up using close to the entire two cans of tomatoes, but you want to be careful and go slow with adding them, because it can turn from chili to soup very quickly. Remember, you can always add, but it&#8217;s very hard to subtract. So start with that, and give it all a good stir to check the consistency. Now add one can of tomato paste and as the chili thickens then start to add the tomato juice slowly to get to the desired consistency.We will leave the tomato sauce out for right now. As the chili cooks taste it every now and then and if tastes like it needs tomato flavor then add on can tomato sauce. Taste a few times during the first hour of cooking to assure that the taste suits you.




 This is the consistency you&#8217;re looking for, although if you like your chili more chunky or more soupy, go for it. But I like mine to hold up well for dipping, but not so runny that you need to almost drink it.
Once you get the right consistency, it&#8217;s time for the seasoning. There is no exact science here, and you can really experiment with what works best for you. But you&#8217;ll want to start with about 2 tablespoons of chili powder, about 5 dashes of Tabasco sauce, and a teaspoon of both cumin and coriander. Top it off with a light sprinkle of cayenne pepper. Give it a good stir and see how it tastes. It will probably be pretty bland, and that&#8217;s fine. Again, it&#8217;s easier to add flavor, but nearly impossible to take it out once it&#8217;s in. So, slow and steady is the key here. After adding the first round of spices, add a little more of each, with the chili powder being the primary ingredient, and add just small amounts of the others. Keep doing this until the taste and amount of heat is right for you. Once everything is taste good its time to *LEAVE THE LID CLOSED *I know its hard to, but every time you take the lid off you release flavor. Only remove the lid to stir....

All you have to do now is let it simmer. At minimum, I try to give it two hours, but if you have four, that&#8217;s great. This long and slow cooking process really gives the meat a chance to become very tender, and all of the flavors and spices to come together. 

So now call up some buds , smoke up some buds ,turn on your game and enjoy....
I have since started adding one can of beer to the recipe.
The pictures of this chili were not taken by me. They were taken by the creator of the *original* recipe.


----------



## Dr.B (Oct 17, 2012)

Sounds really delicious. I've bookmarked this page and surely gonna give it a try this coming weekend.


----------

