(no subject)

[camwyn]

The chili recipe was very good, although I halved it because the original said it fed 8 people.

Good points: tasty, spicy without simply overdoing it on the capsaicin, a texture I prefer to the WHOOPS RANDOM CHUNK OF TOMATO you run into in a lot of Southwestern chili recipes.

Bad points: looks like poo. I mean, seriously, it looked like poo even before I got to the stage that involved dark chocolate. If you have ever seen the Finnish Easter dessert called 'mammi', we are talking the same category of "... really?" on first sight.

However, it smelled good enough and tasted good enough that I'm down with it, and I'll probably make it again in future, chocolate and all.

Comments

[newredshoes]

I've never made it with chocolate or cocoa, actually: my recipe involves a lot of honey, if the poo-look seems like something you wouldn't want to feed guests. Glad you enjoyed it after all!

[camwyn]

This is the recipe I used as a starter. I halved it, because if I make enough chili for eight people it will never get eaten no matter how well chili freezes, and instead of using two cups of beef broth I used a cup and a half, as I am not that fond of runny textures. Worked out remarkably well.

No Fritos, alas, but I did get some other salty corn chips.

[newredshoes]

Whoa, weird -- I've never seen it made with the last about... five ingredients. I've never added stock or sherry: here's my recipe. Interesting!

[camwyn]

Bear in mind the Mast Brothers cookbook is the work of a pair of chocolatiers, so to some degree every recipe in the book is designed to make prominent use of chocolate. As far as the sherry goes, that's just sherry vinegar, not actual booze. I expect red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar would do just as well. Bought the sherry vinegar anyway, if only because I have a certain fondness for seeing how different vinegars turn out if I'm making switchel and I've never had sherry vinegar on hand to try.

(For what it's worth, balsamic vinegar + blackstrap molasses + buckwheat honey + ginger + cold water makes a pretty good combo as far as switchel goes.)

[newredshoes]

That's fair, but it's really the added broth that's throwing me. Then again, I tend to use whole cans of beans and corn and diced tomatoes, juice in, so I suppose it's less of an added liquid than I'm making it out to be if the original recipe calls for draining the other stuff.

[camwyn]

Yeah, the corn and the beans aren't even in the Mast Brothers cookbook to begin with, so the only liquid sources are tomato puree (which is kind of a thickener when it comes down to it) and the beef stock. I'm just glad the online recipe warned the cook to start with relatively less stock, because the recipe as printed just says to go with four cups, which would probably produce a lot of sploosh.

[genarti]

Interesting indeed!

My recipe, for the record, is very similar to Esther's, but minus the corn and plus tomato paste and baker's cocoa powder. And often I throw in some cumin to supplement what's in the chili powder. (Also nowadays I use a soy-based 'ground meat' substitute rather than ground beef or ground turkey, but that's just on account of being vegetarian; I prefer that texture to a beans-only version.)