Gross Football Lunch – Super Bowl LX

Recipe of the Week: True Chili

Method & Analysis:

In the past, I have divided the concept of chili into two classifications. There is Weeknight Chili, which is made in more or less the same way any quick soup or stew or braise is made. You sweat some aromatics and add spices to form a base, then adding the main ingredients and some water in order to simmer them together for however long it takes to cook the main ingredients plus however long past that you can bother to keep it going. This is usually somewhere on the order of 30-45 minutes, so that the total cook time can be wrangled into a relatively convenient 60-90 minutes. This is why I call it Weeknight Chili. It takes time, yeah, but it shouldn’t take much more time than any other weeknight dinner, if any.

What I have not spoken of is True Chili. True Chili is the tastier of the two types of chili, without question, but it takes real work, real effort, and real time to cook properly. There are many kinds of ways to make a True Chili, however, the defining feature of a True Chili is the presence of chili paste in the base. True Chili also carries with it the implication that it shall be simmered until its flavors have fully melded together; while this is not a defining characteristic that chili paste is, one must note that the act of cooking a True Chili is an act of love for yourself and for those with whom you will share the chili, and therefore, it must also be act of love for the chili itself. There shall be no shortcuts taken in making a True Chili, which means there will be no halting of the simmering process due to impatience or other whims. Your True Chili is not done until your True Chili says it is done.

What follows is a method for replicating the pot of True Chili pictured above. What both kinds of chili have in common is that they are both jazz. To the extent that chili has rules, the limits of these rules are limited only by the limits of the chef’s imagination. Except for the basic techniques involved in making the chili paste, you are free to vary this recipe in whatever way you see fit. Make it with turkey, make it with pork shoulder, make it without beans, make it with even more beans, put it on spaghetti and top it with fluffed cheese because you’re a Bengals fan and if the gods have abandoned you, is it not your right if not your duty to abandon the gods in turn? All of these are acceptable ways to make True Chili, so long as you make and use a chili paste and cook the chili with the respect and admiration that it deserves.

To start, let’s make the chili paste, which can be made up to a day in advance. Haul out your dried chilies. Ideally, these dried chilies will be less than a year old, but if you’re like me and you can’t be certain your bags of dried chilies weren’t purchased three years ago when your older brother came down to supervise the Super Bowl chili-making process and told you that dried chilies are best used within a year of purchase, know that you can still make a delicious True Chili with dried chilies that are old enough to walk and talk and use the potty with minimal supervision. You will need at least three kinds of dried chilies, and you will want to use two or three of each kind. I like to use arbol, ancho, and New Mexico chilies, but any combination of three chilies will do. Chop and/or tear your dried chilies into small strips and, as with all hot peppers, dry and fresh alike, discard the seeds if you wish to mitigate the spice levels, but keep some (or all!) of the seeds if you and your cohort are cool and awesome spice lovers.

Once the chilies are processed, set your largest, sturdiest Dutch oven or stock pot on medium-high heat and add the chili strips once the vessel is hot. Stir the chilies constantly; after a few minutes, the chilies will become deeply, enticingly fragrant. Keep stirring for a bit longer, but not so long that the chilies start to burn, then remove and set them aside. Once the pot is empty, add a cup of chicken stock and…oh dear. Fuck. I haven’t told y’all how to make your own chicken stock in this space yet, have I? Shit. My bad, I will do so for Week 1 next season. For now, it’s fine to use the stuff they sell in cartons at the grocery store, however, you must use unsalted chicken stock for this recipe. Your final resulting chili will be plenty salty, trust me.

Add a cup of stock to the pot; if you’re lucky, you may have browned bits of chili pepper stuck to the bottom of the pot, so if you do, scrape them up into the stock at this time. Once the stock has reached a bare simmer, return the dried chilies to the pot and reduce the heat to medium low, so that the stock continues to simmer slowly. Stir occasionally and keep the chilies and stock simmering until the liquid has reduced significantly and taken on the color of the chilies, while the chilies themselves have softened and reconstituted a bit; this will take 5-10 minutes or so.

Turn of the heat and haul out your trustiest blender or food processor. Dump the chilies and stock into the blender, along with some ground cumin, ground coriander (ideally, you will find the time and bandwidth to toast and grind up whole cumin and coriander seeds beforehand, but pobody’s nerfect), and dried oregano. Next, add a few ounces of tomato paste, a couple of anchovy fillets, a splash or three of soy sauce, the entire contents of a can of chipotles in adobo, and a generous amount of salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Blend all of these together until they form into a mostly smooth and homogenous substance. This is your True Chili chili paste. Treat it as you would your own child, by which I of course mean scrape it into an airtight container and refrigerate for up to 24 hours.

Now it’s time to deal with everything else. Grab your beautiful beef slab out of the fridge, remove all packaging, and place it on a cutting board. Cut the chuck roast into chunks; the exact size of these chunks can and will vary, but aim for chunks that are about an inch long along any given edge. Once the entire roast is chunked, cover each chunk with kosher salt and cracked black pepper to the very best of your ability, then leave your chunks out for the next hour so they can season and come to room temperature. Just make sure you leave the beef somewhere the pets won’t be able to get at them, trust me. This hour is your time; if you are a hopeless degenerate procrastinator and haven’t made your chili paste yet, you’d best get to it immediately. Otherwise, do what you feel; if this happens to be dicing up a large onion, a large bell pepper, a fresh jalapeno, and 8-12 cloves of garlic, your life will be easier once this hour is up, but there’s no pressure.

Once the hour is up, it’s time to brown those beautiful beef chunks. Bring your big ass pot back onto the stove, set it over medium-high heat, and add a tablespoon or two of neutral, high smoke point oil. Once the oil is hot and shimmering, carefully place your first batch of beef chunks to brown. Do not crowd the beef whatsoever; leave each chunk a polite amount of personal space. Crowding is the enemy of browning. You are going to brown this beef in batches, and you will thank me for insisting on it. Leave the beef untouched for a few minutes until you see dark brown coming through on the bottom edges, then flip and brown the other side of each. Once each chunk is browned and crusty on at least two sides, remove it to a plate or baking sheet, then repeat the process with another batch until each and every single meat wad is gorgeously browned, adding more oil between each batch if necessary.

Now that the beef is done, it’s time to start sweating aromatics. Turn the heat down to medium to medium-low, then add a splash of olive oil, one finely diced large onion, and a sprinkle of salt. Stir the onion periodically as you dice up the bell pepper and marvel at the sights and smells of diced onions sweating and softening in beef fat and beef fond. Add the diced bell pepper after the onions have gotten a nice start, then add the diced jalapeno after the bell pepper has been going for a bit (discarding the seeds, unless, of course, you like to party), then add the 8-12 minced garlic cloves, along with a sprinkle of dried oregano, rtemembering to add a bit of salt along with each new ingredient.

Once all of these aromatics are going and your kitchen smells like the gentle flatus emissions of a just and loving god, it is time to add the chili paste. Add all of the chili paste back to the bottom of the pot and turn the heat back up to medium-high. Stir every so often but not continuously, as you want some of your paste to get stuck to the bottom of the pot, as that is flavor country. Once the paste is simmering vigorously and a goodly portion of it has gotten stuck, open up a 24 ounce beer vessel and dump it into the pot, then start scraping up all of the beef fond and chili paste and other goodness. Use whatever beer you like.

Once you’ve got the pot scraped up to the best of your ability, add a big can of whole tomatoes, a small can of diced tomatoes, and a whole bunch of salt and pepper, then fill the small tomato can with water and add that to the pot as well. Leave the heat at medium high until the contents of your pot come to a simmer, turn the heat down to medium-low, give everything a quick stir, then piss off 2.5-3 hours, stopping in every 20-30 minutes to check everything out and give it a stir. Somewhere in this period, also drain and rinse a can of black beans before adding them to the pot. When exactly you do this is up to you, but there are no wrong answers.

After these 2.5-3 hours, your chili will have cooked down and thickened considerably, your beef will have cooked through and become tender, and your aromatics will have all but dissolved entirely. Congratulations, you have birthed a big beautiful pot of True Chili. It is yours to do with as you see fit. I have already veered too far into hateful, anti-chili territory by debasing its essential formula in order to produce a written recipe, so I dare not prescribe unto you what toppings and other fixings to serve it with. That said, it may interest you to know that for this chili, I topped it with Jack cheese, sliced avocado, and a spritz of fresh lime juice, and served it with the sturdiest tortilla chips I could fine. Whatever you choose cannot be wrong, so long as your True Chili was cooked with the light, beauty, and truth of what a True Chili can be. Dig in!

Super Bowl LX Pick

My pick for the big game is given in bold..

Seattle Seahawks vs. New England Patriots

I should be excited, right? Let’s face it, back in the preseason, no one in their right mind thought either of these teams could have made it all the way to the Super Bowl. Hell, I didn’t think either of these teams looked particularly good back in those days (although, given how the rest of my preseason predictions went, that probably says more about me than anything else). In theory, these kinds of titanic shake-ups at the top of the standings are the exact miracles that each individual fan dreams of, and which warm the hearts of all but the most black-hearted football observers.

And yet, this game carries none of the excitement of a coming sea change because it hardly feels like a sea change at all, does it? The Seahawks may not have been real, capital-C Contenders since Kam Chancellor left, but they never went away, either. Their opponents are The Fucking Patriots, the actual team of not only the last decade but the one before it, too. I’d rather have the Chiefs – yes, the Chiefs in their current, unwatchable form – repping the AFC than the Patriots again.

This might be the most boring Super Bowl matchup in recent history, and to be perfectly blunt, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this game. I’ve had two weeks to do anything and everything in my power to get excited or, failing that, at least to a point where I’m receiving a steady IV trickle of hype juices, and none of it has worked. Maybe it’s because I went all out in celebrating last year’s absolute dud, to the point that by the time the fourth quarter started my younger brother and I had pivoted to watching Final Fantasy speedruns. Maybe it’s because Sam Darnold’s success reminds me of how badly the Vikings fucked the chicken this offseason. Or maybe it’s because this game straight up sucks.

There is almost nothing to latch onto in this matchup, from either a narrative or a tactical, Xs and Os film junkie standpoint. This is not a clash between an elite offense and an elite defense, nor is it any kind of battle between great teams. The only intrigue I can spot is the looming showdown between Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Christian Gonzalez, which…okay, I can get behind a good WR vs. CB duel, I’m not made of stone. And the thought of seeing Sam Darnold happy makes me happy, too. He seems a good egg, and his redemption is worth celebrating.

But, in all likelihood, this game is going to be a second consecutive blowout, worthy to stand alongside the anticlimactic wet fart Super Bowls of my youth. The Seahawks have been the best team in football all season, whereas I am still not fully convinced the Patriots were even the best team in the AFC East. I am picking the Seahawks because, after an entire postseason of attempting to open my third eye and pierce the unseen veil of the infinite in search of the unalloyed and unrecognizable truths of the post-reality football metaphysick, all I have to show for my efforts are a paltry +9 in the playoff pool, a revolting 4-8 record, and an inescapable sense that I’ve both outsmarted myself and wet myself while giving a presentation in front of the whole class. The Seahawks are a great football team and the Patriots really aren’t, and in all likelihood that will be that.

And yet, I cannot dodge the sinking feeling that the Patriots will squeak out a win under the same kind of bizarre and horrifying circumstances that the franchise has squeaked out all of their six championship victories. I don’t know why this is, and I would love to discard these thoughts out of hand, but I cannot. Perhaps the Seahawks will commit a horrific special teams blunder at the worst possible time, or maybe draw the one and only DPI flag thrown in the entire game late in the fourth quarter while trying to salt away a two-point lead, or perhaps, perish the thought, Darnold will completely melt down (I’m talking on the order of a Full Delhomme, here). If so, expect to apologize to everyone you invite over for your watch party as they head out the door, because they will all be pissed. But really, if you’re going to host a watch party for the big game, you should be prepared to do that anyway.

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Next Friday, Gross Football Lunch will return for one last end of season wrap-up, including this year’s long-delayed and long-dreaded Minnesota Vikings postmortem, plus a few stray bits of housekeeping. Until then, Enjoy the big game, everyone!