The Chili con carne
Yippy !!! I love Mexican food! …tss…tss…tss… Such a beginner mistake… Chili con carne is a god dammed American dish! It first appeared in San Antonio, at the end of the 19th century. The dish was slightly different at this time: The recipe used by American frontier settlers consisted of dried beef, suet, dried chili peppers and salt. They were pounded together, formed into bricks and left to dry, which were then boiled in pots on the trail. Then later, it became street food, sold by brightly dressed Mexican women known as "chili queens".
Since everyone has their own best recipe for this dish, I will give you mine. But don’t you worry, I will not tell you that it’s ‘the best’ recipe and that all the other ones are wrong ! That’s because I never say such obvious facts.
They are two things I like in the chili con carne: the chilies and the meat.
So let’s start with the meat, I am not a huge fan of minced meat, I prefer some nice big chunks of chuck (Norris). It gives the stew a much nicer texture and it tastes better too since it’s far easier to fry.
Now the chilies; it’s actually chili peppers. You should roast them and peal them, this is because the skin of those red, yellow and green suckers is quite hard to digest. Never the less, to give a nice kick that this dish needs the red hot chili peppers are invited too (although, after testing I am absolutely positive it doesn’t work to put the CD in the pot).
So enough blabla, the recipe now !
For 6 starving people :
-500g of beef stew meat
- 2 Onions- 1 stick of celery
- 2 Carrots
- 2 Peppers
- 2 Chillis
- 3 garlic cloves
- 1 small tin of refried beans or if not just kidney beans
- 800 ml of tomato passata (tomato puree)
- 15g of beef stock powder
- 1 stick of cinnamon
- 2 pinch of cumin
-1 pinch of coriander
- 1 pinch of dried oregano
- 1 bit of fresh coriander
So first, preheat the oven at 180 C° then put some mariachi song on.
Ok, now we are ready :
- Put the peppers untouched on a tray, and roast them for 15min, they should come out black
- Peal the onions, carrots and celery, chop them in small dices
- Dice the meat in 2.5cm big cubes
- Crush the garlic cloves and the chili
- Peal the peppers, the skin should come off easily now, de-seed them and cut them in big dices
- In a thick preheated pan, fry the meat with some oil
- When the meat dices are nicely colored, take them out
- Now it the turn of the onions, carrots, celery, garlic and chili to be gently fried
- Lower the heat, add the meat, the tomato passata, the diced peppers and all the other remaining ingredients, add some water if necessary, bring it to the boil.
- Now, the hardest part of this recipe : wait. This stew should cook at least 3 hours, you can either put it in the oven at 150C° with a lid on or leave it cook on the stove on a very low heat.- It has now been 3 hours that your Chili con carne is cooking, which is good news since you really had enough of the mariachi music… Chop a bit of coriander and sparkle it on your stew
- Enjoy this piece of Texas with some rice !!!
