I can't wait for the comments on this one. Don't worry, I'm not gonna be reading them. Your hateful comments are falling on deaf ears.
Are you? No, not really. Don't check in. Don't check them. Yeah, YouTube is a wild place. Okay, let's make some chili.
Hello everybody. Welcome to Home Movies. I'm Alison Roman and today we're making chili. This to me is like meat and beans and tomato and spices and it's brothy and soupy and stewy and you top it with things like cheese and sour cream and scallions if you want. Classic, classic, classic.
I have never written a chili recipe before this and I made this first earlier this year for my husband Max who requested it. He's probably the only person that I like. I always do what he says.
No, I, it's like I was like, you know, we have this conversation a lot where it's like, what do you want for dinner? And he's like, whatever you wanna make. Like he's very deferential 'cause he's just like excited to be eating whatever I wanna make because he is smart and he gets it.
But occasionally he'll request something and it's so sweet when he does that I can't help but oblige and so thus chili was born from that.
Not to be outdone, we are also gonna make this with cornbread. I think my cornbread is really good. I think it's great even. I am not from a place where cornbread is a thing. I grew up eating the Jiffy mix with the thing and the muffins, like a corn muffin. That was sort of my vibe. There is sugar in my cornbread. Not too much, just a little, it's not sweet.
There is also mayonnaise, which people really get a bee in their bonnet about. This wasn't like a decision that I made to piss people off or to like cause a stir. I made it because mayonnaise contains both eggs and oil, two ingredients that are very common in something like cornbread. Also cake. There's chocolate mayonnaise cake. Very popular. People love it.
That said, you can also use sour cream, whatever, but I think the mayonnaise really kind of makes a very delicious, moist cornbread and I stand by it.
So I give a range here, two to three pounds, which sure there's a pound difference between the two, but I mean it like if you want it beefier, go three. If you want it less beefy, go two. I like the idea of inverting the usual, which is like mostly beef with beans. I like that it's like a lot of beans with some beef.
So as you can see, using something like this for like steak might be a bit challenging because there's not even marbling. It's not all fat. There's like different muscle groups that might cook differently. But for something like long braises, long stews, long cook times, it's perfect because it will all kind of just break down. The fat will give itself up in the pot and you'll be left with hunks of like beautiful, gorgeous meat, meat, meat, meat.
Okay, so this is about three pounds and I'm just gonna cut this into big large chunks. Let's call it, what is it? Like two inches? But it's pretty easy to cut. You'll see towards the end of the cooking process we are gonna like kind of encourage the meat to fall apart, like shred it a little bit.
I'm trying to think if this recipe came from my husband asking for beef stew or for chili and he may have said beef stew and I said I'm making chili. Or maybe he wanted, I don't know, it doesn't matter. I don't always do what he says.
I think chili is best served the day after it's cooked. But if you don't have that kind of time, I think the second best thing you could do is season your meat ahead. It's not gonna make or break, but so this is a five and a half quart Dutch oven. This will make the full batch of what we're doing today, which I think will serve six to eight people.
I'm gonna start this with a little bit of oil. You could use olive oil or neutral oil. And I'm just gonna add all this meat to here. This looks crazy. It's gonna shrink and I'm gonna flip it. I promise it's gonna be fine.
All right, while we do that, we are going to cut our onions, we're gonna cut our garlic and then we're gonna talk beans.
You can use a lot more garlic than this if you want, but I feel like starting with about eight cloves is a good place to start.
Great. It's been about 15-ish minutes and the meat is brown as promised. It is gorgeous, golden brown on pretty much all sides.
All right, so I'm gonna add the onions and garlic to this pot, salt and pepper regular style. And I'll probably switch to a wooden spoon now. Say goodbye to these tongs. Goodbye tongs.
So once they start kind of like sticking to the bottom, that's kind of when you know that a lot of that water is going and they go from sweating to sizzling. And once they start to sizzle, you can kind of say, okay, we're good here.
So I'm gonna add the whole can of tomato paste. It's about three quarters of a cup. You could use more or less depending on what you have open. But if you have the whole can just go ahead and add the whole thing.
So as soon as you add that tomato paste, it starts to caramelize on the bottom really quickly. This is not the time to like abandon your pot, but you do kind of wanna stir constantly giving that tomato paste a chance to make contact with the bottom of the pot to kind of brown, take the edge off.
All right, and then comes time for our spices... cumin seed. I'm giving it a chance to kind of like toast and then one and a half teaspoons of hot paprika. And already you could be able to smell the spices toasting.
Don't let this go too far because what will start to happen is the tomato paste will start to kind of burn, adjust the heat as needed, and then two teaspoons of smoked paprika and then chili flake. Again, you can use as much or as little as you want. I'm gonna start with a teaspoon.
And then pretty quickly after that to prevent the bottom of the pot from getting any darker, I'm gonna add my beer and immediately that bottom will start to deglaze. We're not like reducing this at all, we're not like cooking off the alcohol. That will happen naturally as it cooks down for three hours.
So we're gonna season this whole thing with lots of salt and pepper. We're gonna add our water, our beef, and our beans. So if you've made brothy beans before, which I know that you have, you know that they like a lot of liquid.
See, isn't this wild? How little this looks like. This doesn't look like three pounds of meat, but it is.
We are gonna add our tomatoes. Again, we're using crushed. So I'm gonna measure out about six cups of water. All right, I'm adding a full pound of beans to this. Again, this is gonna feed a lot of people. I think it's nice to have it be like primarily beans if I'm honest.
And from here I'm gonna bring this to a boil. I am gonna put the lid on for about half of the time. And that's because I don't want it to evaporate too quickly before the meat and the beans like really get a chance to like cook through because it's kind of about like cooking through to make sure that like they get to a certain point and then like slowly cooking them.
Great. I am gonna clean this up and then we're gonna make cornbread - great.
Cool, cool time for the scale. 'Cause we're baking. You don't need a scale to bake, but I really would like it if you had one.
I made this recipe many, many, many, many, many times before. I was happy with it. It was a real journey and this is where I ended up.
Okay, so I'm gonna melt this butter. While that happens, I'll measure out my dry ingredients which are gonna go into the big bowl. So this is 145 grams of all-purpose flour and 130 grams of cornmeal.
This is gonna get a tablespoon of baking powder. It is providing most of the leavening. Baking powder goes bad. Did you know that if you have baking powder that's like older than I'd say like six months, you might wanna toss it, which feels tragic because who's going through this much baking powder in six months.
But sometimes when people have trouble with baked goods, like cakes not rising specifically, it's oftentimes your baking powder is bad. I hate to tell you. One and a quarter teaspoons of kosher salt.
And then maybe the second most controversial ingredient in this is brown sugar. By adding a little bit of sugar, which is not much in the grand scheme of this recipe, you are gonna like pick up on that corn flavor. It's gonna enhance it. Okay, this is a half a cup, 90 grams.
And then I'm gonna give a few really nice grinds of pepper because I like it. All right, and this, I'm just gonna whisk.
So in this bowl I'm gonna measure out my mayonnaise or sour cream, my eggs, my melted butter, and my buttermilk. And then I'm gonna put the wet into the dry and that's it.
All right, so this is three quarters of a cup of mayonnaise, which is about 170 grams. It doesn't freak me out.
I am gonna use a liquid measuring cup for the buttermilk. This is a half a cup, two large eggs.
This is a lot of fat and a lot of liquid. We're gonna add even more fat when we add that butter. But cornbread I think really needs it. It likes it and it needs it.
So I'm gonna add this to this and then add the butter.
You do wanna be kind of mindful about like over mixing, but it's a pretty wet batter. So it comes together rather quickly and while it's in the stage before it's like fully combined, I am gonna add the butter.
And that's enough to keep in the skillet just as like greased up by the way. And you do wanna make sure it like kind of goes up the sides. If it's not too hot, you can just kind of take your hand.
And you basically just wanna mix it until you can't see any streaky bits of butter. So this goes into whatever baking vessel you choose.
It does puff. I don't want it to overflow. So I'm gonna put this in the oven for how long? 20 to 25 minutes. 20 to 25 minutes. And then we're gonna come back and we're gonna eat our cornbread with our chili. It's gonna be great.
Okay, cornbread came outta the oven. Got a little roasty toasty on top. That's okay, I'm not mad about it. And now we are going to prepare our toppings.
Toppings can be anything you want. It can be one, all, or none of these. It is delicious on its own, but I do feel like part of chili is the toppings experience.
But basically I feel like all the categories are covered. If you have a cheese, I like a sharp cheddar. If you have a sour cream that's gonna be full fat. And then scallion and or onion. I like both. I think they serve different purposes. They have different flavors, different sharpnesses, different textures, different colors. So I like both. And then cilantro, what else?
Is there another chili topping that I'm forgetting? Like a classic chili topping. Really? Yeah. Jalapenos. Maybe. Can we actually go see if Sal has Fritos? Yeah, I also feel like some people do Saltines. What? Yeah, we've already had Saltines in this show. Jalapenos. No. Oh yeah. Jalapenos. Thank you.
All right. I'm just grating this regular style. I've never had less to say.
You don't wanna run out of toppings is what I will say. Maybe some chili flake.
Okay. And then some sour cream, some chips. Frick, will you just grab a bag of corn chips? Yeah. Or tortilla chips. Corn chips? Great.
The moment we've all been waiting for... the chili's done. This is a chili that I made last night or the night before. So the broth itself has like deeply thickened, mostly because of the beans, also 'cause of the fat from the beef.
The meat is still in pretty large chunks. And so what I like to do before I serve it is I like to kind of just like gently smush the beef. But I'll show you, this is like the hunk of beef as it went in. It pretty much just falls apart. It should not give you any resistance. This is what we're going for, right?
You know what could have been like a tough sinewy cut is now like after all this cooking, so tender, so flavorful, so beefy, so delicious. I think this type of food is really perfect for sort of like the cheaper, tougher cuts.
But you can kind of take the meat with your spoon, just kind of crush it a little. So you still get like, you know, like a nice unctuous piece of meat in there.
If you find this doesn't have enough meat for you in your chili preferences, you can definitely increase it by another pound or so. You wouldn't have to change anything else about the recipe.
