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Two thoughts here. First off, when making chili, do you use a recipe, or is it just "some of this, some of that, look what I found in the back of the fridge, and oh, a few of those?" That's the poll.
For those of you who use an actual recipe with measuring and stuff, post your favorite ones here!
Oh. Vote fail for me. I was thinking "homemade recipe vs. canned".
I have a recipe, but I usually improvise on it when I make chili.
I wouldn't say I have a set-in-stone recipe, but I do have general guidelines including an ingredient list, rough proportions, and a list of steps. I mean, I eyeball the amount of cumin, and I freely substitute different chiles depending on what I have, but those are minor variances. However, if my fridge doesn't contain whole (not ground) red meat of some kind, I don't make chili.
Chili is a food tweekers heaven. There needs to be meat, chili powder and tomatoes. After that, the sky is the limit as to what else needs to be in there. I wouldn't say that I have a written down recipie, I have a vague idea of what has worked in the past, and I use that and go from there. The same goes for my red sauce, I like to experiment and it's almost never the same thing twice. My favorite things to make are things that allow me to forage around in the fridge and try and find secondary uses for things that we bought with just one dish in mind and see where they take it.
I am also not capable of making chili in anything less than "Aircraft carrier mess hall" quantities since it freezes so well and it goes awesome with so many things besides itself, like hot dogs and nachos, and just in a bun like a sloppy joe, and mixed with Velveeta, and so on such an so forth.
Hear! Hear!Quote:
Originally posted by Cluricaun
Recipes are for baking!
Well, not entirely. They're also for food from cultures with which I'm totally unfamiliar. Chili, however, is not one of those things for me. I've lived in Texas long enough that I have a pretty good handle on chili. However, I have seen recipes that people have tried to pass off as chili, and I will say, clearly not everyone has that same handle on it. Chili, I would conclude, belongs to the class of recipe where, if you live where it came from and know how it should generally go, you don't really need a recipe.
I don't have a recipe, but I have a few "secret" ingredients which are in some pots and not others (namely, tequila, cocoa powder, honey, cinnamon and/or beer).
My new "rule" (which will make "true" chili fans faint) is that chili must have half pork and half beef. It's amazing the extra layers of flavor that pork provides. But that will probably go out the window if I feel like chili and only have beef on hand!
I start with Ted Rockwell's Roadkill Chili Recipe and then begin to experiment.
I love to print this out and give it to people. The look on their face goes far beyond :eek:.
Heh, heh, heh.
I have only made chili once, and I used a recipe. But I don't think I'd need to use a recipe if I tried again.
Pssh. I don't even use a recipe for baking. All that's required there is an understanding of the chemical reactions. With chili, you're straight up messing with flavor. It's like painting! With food! And...you eat it, instead of looking at it.
Exactly the same, otherwise.
But you need to know the reactions well enough to know the proportions the ingredients need to be in relative to each other, so it does require measurements and such, and bake times are fairly strict...that's what I mean. If I make, say, meringues, I'll try different flavors or whatever, but I still need to think about the proportion of sugar to egg white and how that'll affect the finished product. Similarly, I bake bread without recipes, but if I don't feel like throwing predictability out the window entirely, I need to think about yeast amounts, bake times, and the synergistic or antagonistic effects of certain spices. With chili (and most of my other cooking), I throw things in, taste it, and adjust accordingly; that level of unstructured approach doesn't work with baking.Quote:
Originally posted by Zuul
My only recipe for chili is a list of negatives: no beans, no chicken, no weird shit, etc.
The guidelines just say "Use more spices than that."
Drat! I misread things and voted the wrong way!
Change one of those 'yes' votes to 'no'.
You could say I follow a recipe, in that I've got a couple of types of chili that I pretty much know what's going to be in there.
But there's a lot of variation. Could be hamburger, could be lamb, could be venison, could be chopped up beef roast. One of them requires beans, the other one might have them or not, depending on what I want. Herbs and spices are definitely freehand. I added mushrooms to one on a whim once and liked it so much that they're pretty much always added now.
Like that.