Super Bowl XLV (45) was played on Sunday, February 6th between the Pittsburg Steelers and the Green Bay Packers at Cowboy Stadium in Arlington, Texas. I know because I looked it up on Wikipedia.
While my actual passion for football is pretty near slim, I do like the Super Bowl, which is one of the important American food holidays, along with Thanksgiving (Turkey), the Fourth of July (Hot Dogs) and my birthday (NE Clam Chowder). You can make up your own official birthday food for your birthday, but that’s mine.
The Super Bowl menu includes chicken wings, beer, nachos, several varieties of chips and pretzels…and chili. How chili got to be synonymous with the game I’m not sure, except that football is pretty big in the Lone Star State and they come by their chili honestly.
Now, you might ask if chili qualifies as a soup, and I won’t argue with you if you say it doesn’t. I won’t listen to you either. Hey, you can always add more water and make it a soup. Campbell’s did,and it was pretty darn good, which makes it hard to understand why they don’t make it anymore. Hormel’s canned chili is pretty good too, and I happen to know it once won a chili cook-off at the Pentagon until its identity was discovered. There are lots of things we could argue about regarding authentic chili, and if you want, feel free to head to the nearest sports bar and we can settle things over ice cold long neck Buds. If I’m not there, start without me.
click on image for flickr set
As usual, this chili won’t be anything like those, but I’m pretty sure it will be pretty good. I’m calling it Super Bowl 45 Chili because it’s got too much stuff in it to call it by ingredients. Which are:
Players:
- 1 lb Black Beans
- 1 lb Pinto Beans (though I was planning on Kidney beans)
- 2 lb Ground Beef
- 2 lb ground Pork
- 3 14.5 oz cans Diced Tomatoes (or one can diced and two cans whole that I had to attack with my hand blender.)
- One Large Yellow Onion
- One Large Red Pepper
- 1 oz Garlic
Cheerleaders:
- 6 tablespoons Chili Powder
- 2 tablespoons Cumin
- Salt
Mascots
- Sour Cream
- Grated Cheese (Pepper Jack)
I started by soaking the beans overnight. I tried soaking them in the two quart measuring cup, but my gal (a Texan) pointed out that there wasn’t nearly enough room in there and they’d swell up until some were high and dry. I told her to mind her own business. Then I put them in a bigger pot.
This chili had better be good, because there’s going to be a lot of it.
I browned up all four ounds of ground meat, a pound at a time so I could actually get some browning on them. You have to bring your pan up to heat, add a teaspoon or so of oil and mush the meat into a big flat patty, then leave it alone on med-high heat for five to ten minutes. Otherwise all you wind up with is steamed meat cooked in a frying pan, and you might as well have thrown it in to the soup raw.
The beans expanded to about twice their original volume, as the Texan predicted, also having predicted I’d need both of my 8 qt stockpots for the chili. The realization that I was making more chili than I needed, as well as that my bean to beef ration was way off, leaving me with a chili flavored bean soup with ground beef and pork made me stop and rethink the game plan.
OK, I’ll make two bean soup in one pot, and chili con carne in the other. I can add beans to the chili and keep the remaining bean soup as a base for other projects. Or throw it all in together, but now I’ve got options.
The Texan asked if that didn’t ruin the whole simmering it all together thing.
I’m doing a layered approach to soup, was my response, and it’s actually the truth. I want to see if you can make bases and add components towards the end to keep their identities distinct. The melding, my theory goes, happens overnight in the fridge.
The beans got strained and picked over, then put in the bean pot with water to cover an inch over the soup.
As each batch of meat got browned, I added it to the chili pot. In order to get a good sear on each batch, I deglazed the pan with a cup of water and added that to the chili as well.
With the meat all in I added two 14.5 oz cans of diced tomatoes, one 12 oz can of tomatoe paste, and a quart of water to the chili and brought it up to a boil.
I added four generous tablespoons of chili powder and one tablespoon of cumin to the chili, along with a level tablespoon of kosher salt to each pot. It will need more salt later, but I had to take the edge off them so I could get an idea of the seasonings during the inevitable tasting.
At this point I’ve got a pot of mixed beans and a pot of tomato soup with beef and pork. It does look chili red though, and the taste is promising. Reduce to simmer and cover both pots.
Wait, did I forget anything?
You mean like sautéed onions and garlic, and roasted red peppers. Not exactly.
The three red peppers now go into a 450 degree oven for 25 minutes (turning every 10), while I saute the onion and garlic until it’s starting to brown.
The onion-garlic gets divided between the two pots, though if I’d had two onions it wouldn’t have been a bad thing.
While soup simmers and peppers roast, it’s time for some cleanup, and the Texan wants a cup of the chili con carne for lunch.
It’s not ready.
It’s ready enough.
Fine. When I figure my yield I get to add in anther cup. Make that two cups. I’ve got to eat too…OK, she’s right again. it’s pretty good already.
When the red peppers come out their blackened more or less all over, and we’ve got to remove the skin. Placing them in a bowl with saran wrap over them let’s their moisture do most of the work for us, loosening the skin. After twenty minutes they’re cool enough to peel. After peeling, the seeds come out and they get chopped into ½ inch squares. I won’t add them until the end of the simmering, or they’d dissolve and pretty much lose the point of having been there in the first place. What they will add, besides a little roast flavor, is some sweetness, which the tomato is going to need to offset it.
Things are looking good at this point. The kitchen’s clean and the two pots are simmering away. Time for the cook to take a break.
It’s a beautiful day today, so Tex and I took a walk down by the Potomac. The temperature was getting up towards 50 and it seemed like spring had to be on the way. By the time I got back from the walk the beans were as done as I wanted, not quite falling apart. In order to get that cooked for two days texture that works so well for beans, I took two pints and ran my hand blender through them, then returned the puree to the soup. Instant texture.
Now, if you’ve been following so far, you’ll notice that the beans haven’t gotten any flavor added to them. A little onion and garlic, true, but nothing noticeable, and it shows. I happen to have a bag full of seasoning packets from dried oriental noodle soups that I only used half of the packet for, so I tossed in a pork flavor packet and stirred it up. The result was a two bean (black and pinto) soup that would stand on its own with no trouble.
I immediately put three quarts in pint containers for future soups. The other quart I put into the chili.
The result was that the bright red of the chili darkened down towards a more chili like color, and the beans added a lot of flavor without taking over the soup.
Almost done.
A bit more seasoning to the chili, including a teaspoon of salt, another teaspoon of cayenne, and a tablespoon of brown sugar. Seasoning wise, that’s a wrap.
There was one more thing I wanted to do though, both to thicken the soup up a bit and to add another flavor.
First I ladled off cup of liquid from the chilli and put it in a bowl. Then I added a cup of crushed plain unsalted tortilla chips and ran my hand blender through it. I added the resulting slurry to the chili and heated it all through until it began simmering…then shut it off to let it rest.
I may have sampled another cup at that point though.