Cincinnati-Style Chili

This recipe doesn’t come from Cincinnati, but it’s similar to the style of chili you often find served there (typically at a place like Skyline Chili), hence the name.

Serves

A lot! (if you do it right)

Hardware

Ingredients

1/2 - 2/3 vol   small red beans, cooked
1 unit   ground beef
1/4 wt   onions, chopped
  garlic, minced
2/3 wt   canned tomatoes, chopped, juice reserved
  ground cumin
  chili powder
  cayenne powder
  beer (or stock)
  salt

Procedure

  1. Pick over the beans and remove any that are damaged, as well as any rocks or other debris; rinse well in cold water.

  2. Put the beans and 3 times their volume of water in a pot, and simmer until the beans are almost soft. This can take from 1 to 3 hours depending on the quantity of beans you’re cooking. With small red beans there’s no need to soak them before cooking them.

  3. After the beans have reached a simmer, prepare the rest of the ingredients: chop the onions, peel the garlic, and chop the tomatoes; if you’re making your own chili powder (and you really should), now’s the time to do it. However, don’t mince the garlic until just before you’re ready to cook it.

  4. Working in batches, brown the ground beef in the sauteuse pan over a high heat; drain the meat and reserve the liquid. Put the dripping from the first batch or two in a bowl and put that in the freezer; this will make it easy to skim off the fat for cooking the onions. Repeat until all the beef is cooked.

  5. Using some of the fat you drained from the beef, saute the onions over a medium heat until they’re almost soft; somewhere along the way (but not too early), add the garlic.

  6. If you timed it just right, the beans will have finished cooking just about now; drain them and add them to the beef, onions, and garlic. Add the tomatoes, spices, beer, and just a pinch of salt.

  7. Bring to a simmer, stirring frequently.

  8. Cook, uncovered, stirring often enough to avoid burning anything onto the bottom of the pot, until the chili reaches the desired consistency and the beans are fully cooked. Again, this can take anywhere from 1 to 4 hours. Every so often, taste the chili and adjust the spices to suit your tastes; however, I suggest not adding salt until the very end: It’s easy to add too much salt early on, it’s impossible to take it back out, and I don’t believe when you add the salt affects the taste of the final dish. (At least, not in something like this.)

Notes

There are no exact quantities for this recipe, but rather, proportions; by way of illustration, here are the actual quantities I used for the last batch I made:

10 cups   beans
10 lbs   ground beef
2 3/4 lbs   onions
1 head   garlic
6 lbs   canned tomatoes

On measuring the ingredients:

  1. One pound of (uncooked) ground beef has a volume of 2 cups. Well, not quite, but close enough for our purposes. I like to use 85% lean beef. You could use beef with less fat, but it also has less flavor.

  2. Measure the beans after you’ve cooked them; when cooked, dried beans will expand to aproximately 2 1/4 times their original volume. One pound of (dried) small red beans has a volume of aproximately 2 1/3 cups.

  3. Weigh the onions after you’ve trimmed them; that is, after you’ve cut off the root and the stem and removed the skin.

  4. Weigh only the tomatoes (and whatever juice is inside them); a 28 oz can will typically yield 18 oz of tomatoes.

I like to use just enough liquid (beer or stock, but please, not water!) to almost cover the meat, beans, onions, and tomatoes; this makes for a slightly soupy chili, but in keeping with Cincinnati style, this is the desired outcome.

I always make this chili using beer, typically a pilsner or a lager; my favorite is Dos Equis Lager – which according to their own web site is actually a pilsner. Any combination of beer, stock, and some of the juice from the canned tomatoes will work, but too much of the tomato juice will alter the flavor significantly. I don’t recommend using wine, and under no circumstances should you even consider using water.

I can’t begin to tell you how much spice to use, as there are just too many variables: how picanté you like your food, how old your spices are, how hot your paprika is, how much pepper is in your chili powder, … I can’t even tell you how much I used because I don’t really measure. As a rough estimate I think I use two parts cumin, two parts chili powder, and one part cayenne – but remember, I like my chili more spicy than not. You’re just going to experiment to learn what suits your tastes.

If you use canned beans, be sure to drain and rinse them; however, I strongly suggest you cook your own, as you’ll have much more control over the texture and flavor – and most importantly how salty they are. Besides, dried beans are much cheaper than canned.

About the hardware: You could simmer the chili in one very large pot; I use two smaller pots so I can make some of it less spicy (for my wife). Trying to brown meat or sautee onions and garlic in a very large pot is hard: they’re too tall, and things have a tendency to burn because the metal is so thin. For that reason I prefer to use a smaller pot and work in several batches. If you have “flame tamers” (discs of heavy metal to distribute the heat over a larger area) you should use them during the simmering; if you don’t have them, be sure to stir the pots often or you’ll likely burn some onto the bottom of the pots.

Rating

Source

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