2010 Cooking Club Week 24: Chilli!

No! I knew I would be, but I didn't think everyone else would enjoy it quite so much. Nice to be wrong

Glad you liked it Muahahaha. Like oB said, most of the heat's from the fresh chilli and the new mexico reds (and in my own version, the chilli powder because I've started making my own). The anchos are really mild and the chipotles even milder (they're just smoked jalapenos, which are the mildest chilli going, you could eat them raw without much pain). If you want to dial down the heat, cut back on the new mexico reds and the fresh chillis and add more adobo chillis to replace them (about the same quantities for the dried chillis and if you're swapping dried adobos for fresh chilli, use a bit more of the dried than you did of the fresh). And of course reverse that to dial up the heat. Personally I hit my limit when I get to the habaneros, but your milage may vary. Other than that, I'd keep all the ratios intact, but I wouldn't increase the batch sizes when browning and I'd watch the cooking times as well, you're going to need much longer when the quantities double, obviously. And that means that if you were cooking in an ordinary pot instead of a pressure cooker or a slow cooker, that you'd have to watch the liquid levels as you'd get more evaporation.

BTW, this stuff freezes wonderfully, because the freezing and thawing just tenderises the meat even more (you might need to add a little flour or masa harina to thicken it up when it's thawed and heated though, but check first, it might be fine). I've had bowls of this that had been frozen for three months and they were great.

And I have a pressure cooker full of the stuff at home for tea tonight too

No worries Muahahaha, glad you liked it!

LordChessington wrote: »

Two added cups of water later and it was grand.

Tsk, tsk. ADD MOAR BEER!!!

Naw, water's grand, but a little bland. Beer is good (no, seriously, the alcohol dissolves some of the compounds that give the dish taste but which aren't water-soluble -- same idea as you get in tomato sauces that use white wine or vodka), beef stock is good too for top-ups (I wouldn't use beef stock at the beginning, because you're making your own beef stock in the chilli as it cooks, so why bother?).

Er. Never actually measured it to be honest, but I know it's atkins-friendly as long as you leave out the beans/rice/tortillas and the like (it was a cornerstone of my diet last time I tried that, and Herself Indoors ate it quite a lot when dieting as well). I don't think it's be much above average for chilli; the main carbs would be from the beer and the flour in the gravy; there's not much in the onions or chillis or the meat and we don't use cans and cans of tomatoes or sweetcorn or beans so there's not as much carbs and sugar from the fruit in there. We might even be below average. To be honest, I think - but again, I've not tested it - that it'd be hard to get fat eating good chilli if you leave out all the toppings that people put on it (cheese, sour cream, jalapeno relish and so on) and the tortillas and rice they serve it with (and possibly the beans). Don't forget, it started off as poor people food -- it kept you alive, but you didn't see many fat poor people back then (that's a very very recent trend from the last few decades, when we turned creating food into an industrial practice).

I'd skip the pulled pork for a weight loss diet You just can't get round the BBQ sauce because every style of BBQ sauce has lots of sugar in it, and without the sauce, it's just not as nice as it could be (now, if you were cooking it in a real BBQ pit with the smoke, that might be different...)

I don't think the collagen to gelatin conversion does anything to the fat content; eat a pound of either and your body breaks it down to the same stuff (the conversion process doesn't add or remove elements to or from the compounds, just moves them about a bit). It's just that gelatin has a nicer mouth feel than collagen because it liquifies and coats all the muscle fibres.

ps. Don't eat a pound of either; a pound of gelatin is probably not good for you and a pound of collagen would make you swear off food for a month and probably clog your GI tract like a pound of hair in a shower drain...

/weeps at the thought of pulled pork without delicious BBQ sauce dripping over every morsel...

Hm. If you have that much pork shoulder, I can think of a better use for it, but yes, you could use it in this recipe as well. I might brown it a little less, and most people will be expecting chilli to be a beef dish, but hey, it's poor people food, it's meant to be adapted to what's on hand...

There's a mexican place up near the Dublin Castle end of Dame Street that was mentioned here a while back, you might take a search for that...

In other news, I tried making the recipe using an India Pale Ale. Results are quite good; but I would urge you not to lean over the pot of boiling IPA to switch on the extraction fan if you're planning on inhaling and remaining sober. Turn on fan; then dump half-litre of IPA into the pot...