This Year's Chili
The Friday Newsletter is ready to roll out the latest model
Friends, it’s chili season.
All it takes is a single gust of brisk autumn air for me to get charged up for my favorite culinary adventure, a long afternoon spent turning an unnecessary amount of ingredients into a thick, rich, bubbling pot of rib-sticking red.
Of course, no two pots of chili are exactly the same, just as no two seasons are the same. My chilis morph and change and evolve over time; I’ll pick up new techniques or new ingredient flourishes and carry them over from one batch to the next, but I’m telling a different story each time. And I like to mix it up!
Two years ago, I landed on an extra-thick recipe that added Mexican chorizo and Italian sausage to the traditional beef for a triple-threat flavor punch.
Last fall, I zagged back from that zig, challenging myself to make a just-as-rich chili that was entirely vegan—and without the use of any meat-simulation products.
(It succeeded wildly, and that recipe is here.)
Now, it’s time to roll out this year’s chili—one which won’t be quite the same as last year’s or next year’s, but will share some of the same culinary DNA.
It’s always Friday at The Action Cookbook Newsletter, and I’ve got a great slate of stuff on tap to improve your weekend today, including:
Chili! (I feel like you probably saw that coming by now.)
A cocktail that compresses an orchard’s worth of autumn into a single glass
Retro-chic music grooves, a must-read memoir, a satisfying movie, topics for discussion in The Internet’s Best Comment Section, reader pets, and more!
7) The smash hit of the season
I’m known to enjoy a non-traditional chili from time to time; a white chicken chili or a pork chile verde can be a delight, and of course my vocal and partly-sincere embrace of Cincinnati-style chili is well-known.
Those are discussions for another day, though.
Today, I’m sticking to the basics: beef, beans, and chilies. It’s hard to go wrong with that combo, unless you’re one of those finicky Texans who rail against the idea of beans in chili. (To each their own, but beans are delicious and we could all use a little extra fiber, amiright?)
What I wanted to avoid with this batch was gray, mushy ground beef that’d had all of its flavor cooked off in long simmer. I wanted to get big, meaty bites of beef with crisp, browned edges.
I wanted smashburgers in my chili.
The rise of the smashburger has been one of my favorite mainstream food trends of late—greasy spoons and bistros alike embracing the simple magic of thin burger patties pressed onto a searing-hot skillet, quickly cooked to maximize the Maillard reaction and ratio of crisp surface to volume.
For this chili, I opted to follow a fairly typical (for me) ingredient list, but reserve the beef until the very end, griddling it separately and then breaking it up into the almost-finished chili. The beef will retain its distinct flavor, standing up to the other flavors in the pot without being subsumed by them.
AC’s SmashBurger Chili with Beans
(Serves 8-10)