Smoked ChiliClick Pics For Large View After the ice storm last weekend, I decided a pot of smoked chili would hit the spot. I sorely needed a ribsticking, spicy meal to take the chill out of my old bones. And I figured Heck, if I'm making chili I might as well do it right and smoke the ground beef to make it special.Smoked Chili Spices and Seasonings As you can see in the picture, all the dry spices, garlic and onions have been added to my cast iron braising pan. The garlic and onions become tender, and the flavors of the spices open up, or bloom, as the fancy cooks might say. Many of the flavor and aroma components in spices are fat soluble, so when heated in oil all that flavor is released. The heat is set to medium low, and this group of ingredients is sauteed for just a few minutes.Smoking Chili Meat The chili meat was place in my new Weber vegetable grilling pan (no one told me I couldn't use it for meat, too). Setting it on a raised rack placed in a baking sheet kept my Weber grill nice and clean.I used one charcoal basket filled with prelit lump charcoal, and topped it off with a foil packet containing 4 Bradley-style smoker wood Bisquettes - Jim Beam flavor, no less! The intake vents at the bottom of the grill were left wide open, and the lid vent closed halfway. An important point to remember is to position the lid vent on the side opposite the basket of charcoal. This assures that the smoke has to travel across the meat before it makes its escape. Smoked Ground Beef #2 This is simply a picture of the now-smoked chili meat in a bowl. I thought it looked pretty appetizing, so here it is. Important point number two - don't overcook the ground beef. All it needs is 20 or 30 minutes of smoke contact to get flavored, and during that time it will be almost done. Any more than that and the meat will become dry, tough, and lose a lot of great flavor from the loss of juices. Finishing the Smoky Chili A few more ingredients go into the spice and oil and garlic and onion mixture now. Add the tomato paste, tomato sauce, chicken stock, a bit of vinegar, sugar and salt.Now, dump in the meat, and dump in the beans, if you're so inclined (beans are optional, but if not added, cut the amount of chicken stock in half). Gently stir it all up, cover the pot, and let it simmer on low for about a half hour. Serve with crackers, or even a batch of fresh cornbread hot out of the oven. For me, a dollop of sour cream, a slurp of ketchup and a few chopped green onion pieces make this dish complete. And now the recipe... Smoked Chili RecipeLight charcoal, begin smoking the ground beef. |
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