Recipes are starting points, not destinations. The more we liberate ourselves from them, the more fun and creative our home cooking experience can be. It helps to understand that most recipes work in someone else's kitchen with their cookware and represent pure anecdote. Aside from baking, every step of a recipe represents a potential divergence, and most every ingredient serves a specific purpose and is potentially replaceable. The Food Network, all the cooking magazines, and the dizzying number of recipe books have made cooking today easier than ever, but the quality of the end result isn't as dependent on how well you follow the steps as it is on fundamental technique. Is it all just getting lost in translation? Take a look at this
chili recipe I found on Epicurious.
Active time: 1 3/4 hr Start to finish: 6 1/2 hr (plus 1 to 2 days for flavors to develop)
Yield: Makes 8 servings
Active Time: 1 3/4 hr
Total Time: 6 1/2 hr (plus 1 to 2 days for flavors to develop)
2 oz dried ancho chiles (4 large), stemmed and seeded
6 large garlic cloves, 3 of them finely chopped
1 tablespoon salt, or to taste
1 1/2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 1/2 tablespoons chili powder (not pure chile)
4 lb well-marbled beef brisket or boneless chuck, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2- to 2-inch pieces
3 to 4 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 (28- to 32-oz) can whole tomatoes in juice
1/4 cup canned chipotle chiles in adobo
1/2 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro
1 1/2 lb white onions, chopped (4 cups)
1 tablespoon dried oregano (preferably Mexican), crumbled
1 to 4 fresh serrano or other small green chiles, finely chopped, including seeds (1 is fine for most tastes; 4 is the eight-alarm version)
1 (12-oz) bottle beer (not dark)
2 cups water
2 1/2 cups cooked pinto beans (optional; 30 oz), rinsed if canned
Soak ancho chiles in hot water to cover until softened, about 30 minutes. Drain well.
While chiles soak, mince 1 whole garlic clove and mash to a paste with 1/2 tablespoon salt, 1/2 tablespoon cumin, and 1/2 tablespoon chili powder. Pat beef dry and toss with spice mixture in a large bowl until coated.
Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a wide 6- to 7-quart heavy pot over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then brown beef in 3 or 4 batches, without crowding, turning occasionally, about 5 minutes per batch (lower heat as needed; spice mixture burns easily). Transfer beef as browned to another bowl. (Do not clean pot.)
Purée anchos in a blender along with tomatoes (including juice), chipotles in adobo, cilantro, remaining 2 whole garlic cloves, and remaining 1/2 tablespoon salt until smooth.
Add enough oil to fat in pot to total 3 tablespoons, then cook onions and chopped garlic over moderate heat, stirring and scraping up brown bits from beef, until softened, 8 to 10 minutes. Add oregano, remaining tablespoon cumin, and remaining tablespoon chili powder and cook, stirring, 2 minutes. Add chile purée and 1 chopped serrano and simmer, stirring, 5 minutes. Stir in beer, water, and beef along with any juices accumulated in bowl and gently simmer, partially covered, stirring occasionally and checking often to make sure chili is not scorching, 2 hours.
Taste sauce, then add more serrano if desired and continue to simmer, partially covered, until beef is very tender and sauce is slightly thickened, 1 to 2 hours more. (If chili becomes very thick before meat is tender, thin with water as needed.)
Coarsely shred meat (still in pot) with 2 forks and cool chili completely, uncovered, then chill, covered, 1 to 2 days to allow flavors to develop.
Reheat over low heat, partially covered, stirring occasionally, until hot, about 30 minutes. Add beans (if using) and simmer, stirring, 5 minutes.
6 1/2 hours? That right there is probably enough to discourage a lot of people from making this recipe. If you look at this a little closer and apply some basic fundamentals, this is not a very complicated recipe. There are a few ingredients, but it all comes together pretty quick. Most of the cooking time is spent simmering if you plan well. Let's dissect this and figure out how they made it, and see if there's an alternative.
Soak ancho chiles in hot water to cover until softened, about 30 minutes. Drain well. Nothing too mysterious. This is one way to treat dried chiles (read: peppers). Alternatively, toast them dry in a hot pan to add another flavor layer or fry them to infuse oil that you might use to sautee with later. Regardless, in the end you need these peppers to soften because they'll be pureed. And all that you're making is a Mexican-style Adobo sauce. Seemed like an easy step, right? Let's keep reading.
While chiles soak, mince 1 whole garlic clove and mash to a paste with 1/2 tablespoon salt, 1/2 tablespoon cumin, and 1/2 tablespoon chili powder. Pat beef dry and toss with spice mixture in a large bowl until coated. In order to cheat a little bit and both increase flavor depth and help the meat to brown, a paste is made with garlic, salt, cumin, and chili powder. Already, there's a flaw in this step: garlic. If you've ever smelled burned garlic, it's inedible because it's terribly bitter. Frankly, this step is unnecessary. You can sprinkle the powders and salt onto room-temperature meat and sautee at high heat. Browning the meat is the most critical step that will majorly impact the final product. The browning causes the proteins on the surface to undergo Maillard reaction which gives browned meat the salty, sweet, crunchy goodness we love. If you don't brown the meat properly, you'll either steam it or poach it, neither of which will be as good as well-browned meat. And if you brown your garlic coated meat at the required temperature to do it properly, the garlic will burn, almost without question. Alternative? Add either some roasted garlic cloves to the finished product prior to puree or just skip it all together.
Heat 2 tablespoons oil in a wide 6- to 7-quart heavy pot over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then brown beef in 3 or 4 batches, without crowding, turning occasionally, about 5 minutes per batch (lower heat as needed; spice mixture burns easily). This is the step that will separate good from great, and requires attention. For starters, what cookware should you use? The ideal for me here is an enameled cast iron dutch oven 5-7 quarts. If it's too big, the liquid will evaporate too quickly, if it's too small, you may not have enough liquid to stew in. Next question, how deep should the oil be? The volume of oil they give works in their dutch oven, maybe not yours. The principle is that you want to maximize contact between meat and fire to evenly brown, and oil is the middle man, so, this is basically pan frying. Therefore, your meat should be neatly cubed to provide flat surfaces, and you'll need enough oil to fill the pan about 1/8 inch. They want you to heat the oil pretty hot, but not to the smoke point, so watch your oil selection and your temperature. You want batches where the meat doesn't touch each other, because if they touch, they're more likely to produce steam which cooks without browning. 5 minutes per batch seems way too short, but maybe the normal laws of physics and heat transfer don't apply to their kitchen. Brown for as long as they need to be nice and dark which will give a nice flavor to the meat, create a strong flavor base, and leave behind fond in the bottom of the pan which will be used (more on that later). The bigger you cut the meat, the less likely you'll be to overcook it. This recipe has you shredding the meat anyway. If you buy precut stew meat, they're a little small and totally nonuniform in size because it's otherwise throwaway scraps. Consider a chuck or rump roast that you can cut into the pieces you want.
Transfer beef as browned to another bowl. (Do not clean pot.)
Don't get in the habit of resting meat in a bowl. It won't matter for this preparation, but it will for temperature sensitive stuff like steak, lamb, fish, etc. Resting on a wire rack prevents steam from forming and overcooking your meat. It's a good point to not clean the pot, because the fond (charred brown bits on the bottom of your pan) holds a ton of flavor and will be the base of the "stock."
Purée anchos in a blender along with tomatoes (including juice), chipotles in adobo, cilantro, remaining 2 whole garlic cloves, and remaining 1/2 tablespoon salt until smooth. This is how you make a standard Mexican-style adobo sauce. You want softened ancho chiles, canned tomatoes, and garlic. Wouldn't it be great if this is where you replaced raw garlic cloves with roasted ones? Couldn't you also cook your tomatoes? What about tomato paste to add some depth? Yes, yes, and yes. This will be dependent on your tomato selection. Local grocery store brand probably needs some doctoring to taste better. If you can find DOP-certified San Marzano tomatoes, they're awesome and really sweet. OK, so they're 4-5 bucks or so per can. You're already saving money by using cheap meat, so splurge. As for the cilantro, I personally wouldn't add herbs at this point. Why? The aromaticity of the herbs will be lost because you're going to be cooking with them. Fresh cilantro is best used as a garnish at the end.
Add enough oil to fat in pot to total 3 tablespoons, then cook onions and chopped garlic over moderate heat, stirring and scraping up brown bits from beef, until softened, 8 to 10 minutes. Straightforward enough right? Maybe not. Onions behave very differently depending on how they're cooked. There's a big difference between French onion soup and onion rings. The former depends on caramelization created by deep browning, the latter fries batter while trapping steam internally. All you're doing in this step is sweating the veggies to make them aromatic. This is similar step to creating stock, you're just leaving out the carrots and the celery/green peppers/fennel/etc. The other thing your doing is deglazing your pan. Going with low heat here will cook the veggies with steam from their own water that can act as a solvent to help you get the brown stuff off the bottom of your pan. Whatever you do, don't wash this part off and throw it away, because you worked really hard to get it. It's the same stuff (fond) that you use when making a pan sauce, and it has concentrated flavors of the browned meat. Low and slow, you don't want your veggies to brown because burned garlic tastes bad, and browned onions are sweet but probably not what you're going for here.
Add oregano, remaining tablespoon cumin, and remaining tablespoon chili powder and cook, stirring, 2 minutes. Not much to say about this step except that crushing dried oregano prior to putting in the pan is a good idea, gets the aroma going, and that anytime you use seeds instead of powder you're getting more flavor. If you had cumin seeds, you could just toast them, grind them in a mortar and pestle, and add. Once they're ground, the flavor decreases over time. Extra chili powder is just more flavor, but now that your veggies are wet from softening, it should stick.
Add chile purée and 1 chopped serrano and simmer, stirring, 5 minutes. As the ingredients warn, this is where your heat is going to come from. Serranos are a little hotter than jalapenos, either can be used here. The heat doesn't come from the seeds as much as it comes from the white membranes holding the seed pods in place. Taste a little bit of them raw, because there is a lot of variability in how much heat they have, mostly dependent on how young they were when picked. In general, the more mature, the hotter. The chile puree/adobo is your liquid base and will continue cooking your meat.
Stir in beer, water, and beef along with any juices accumulated in bowl and gently simmer, partially covered, stirring occasionally and checking often to make sure chili is not scorching, 2 hours. I guess the beer is for flavor, there's really no reason you couldn't use dark beer, but it depends on what you want your final color to be. The alcohol (not that there's very much) may help act as a solvent to blend your flavors, but frankly is unnecessary. Just think about what color you want your chili to be: brown or red. If you want your broth to be darker, then add some dark beer. Otherwise, don't waste a good beer, just drink it!
Taste sauce, then add more serrano if desired and continue to simmer, partially covered, until beef is very tender and sauce is slightly thickened, 1 to 2 hours more. (If chili becomes very thick before meat is tender, thin with water as needed.) Good points, that you should always taste. Here's where you should consider salinity. Should you salt to taste now? NO! Why? Because if you cook it the way they tell you, partially covered, you'll concentrate the liquid, also concentrating salt. At this point, the salt doesn't really do anything for you, so add it at the end. You can also cover with a parchment lid if you want. Leaving the pot partially covered does something else, also. Moreso with a braise, the top of the meat is just covered, and the liquid is close to but not boiling. Sort of. Some of the water is boiling and producing steam, other parts are not. The steam, if trapped by a tight lid, will superheat and overcook whatever is exposed, and if that's meat, it will become tough. If you have a loose lid, the heat will escape and cook lower and slower on the exposed meat, if there is any. Of course, you can't heat liquid water more than 100C, but you knew that. Right? So if the meat is in the liquid, it has to cook low and slow. The times here are all relative, and you cook it until the meat is tender. However long that is. Mine cooked for about 12-14 hours without ill effect.
Coarsely shred meat (still in pot) with 2 forks and cool chili completely, uncovered, then chill, covered, 1 to 2 days to allow flavors to develop.
Reheat over low heat, partially covered, stirring occasionally, until hot, about 30 minutes. Add beans (if using) and simmer, stirring, 5 minutes. Final steps. Shredding the meat just makes it easier to eat. Chilling and reheating does bring everything together. I don't know if the flavors develop as much as they blend. This is a good point about the beans. Canned beans would work well for this, they're already cooked, and you add them at the end so they don't overcook.
I know it was wordy, but you can see that there are a couple of steps that will make the difference in this dish, and cooks at different skill levels will make two very different dishes. Just to review, look at the steps strictly from a technical point of view. Should it go without saying that this dish needs to be made at least a day ahead of time?
1. Create the stock and your adobo sauce. This is what your doing with the ancho chiles, tomatoes, onions and garlic, and fond from browning the meat.
2. Brown the meat. Sets the foundation, and the battle will be won or lost here.
3. Stew the meat. Straightforward technique. The flavors are already developed, you just need to cook your meat.
4. Chill, allow the flavors to homogenize, and serve.
