• About 2 pounds of beef.  Anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 will do.  You could use ground beef if you want, but what I usually do is go to the store and get the cheapest steak or roast or whatever that they have.
• 2-4 peppers.  Bell peppers of different colors will do, as will poblano chiles if you want a more balanced heat.
• 2-3 onions.  3 little ones or 2 big ones.  Use your judgment.
  
• Beer.  If you have no taste, I guess you could use a cheap beer, but lately I like using a domestic Belgian-style ale, like Ommegang.
  
• 4 medium cloves or so of garlic.  You can even use garlic powder if you're feeling lame or lazy.
• 1 tablespoon or so of cumin seeds.  Get them in bulk; they seem to keep forever.
• Half a teaspoon of fennel seeds.  Skip this if you don't want to invest in fennel seeds.  Do not skip the cumin seeds.
• 1/8 teaspoon of cinnamon, optionally.
• 1 1/2 teaspoon or so oregano
• 1 teaspoon or so basil.
• 1-2 teaspoons of chocolate.
• 2 teaspoons of corn flour.  This is (for the purposes of this recipe) the same as masa harina, but not the same as polenta (which is more coarse).
• A bay leaf.
• A 28-oz can (give or take) of whole tomatoes
• 2 16-oz cans of beans.  These would be optional, but I hear I can irritate Texans [†] by saying they're required, so there you go.
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Chiles.  It's chile con carne, right?  You will need at least:
• One dried big mild chile, like an ancho or a new mexico chile.
• More chiles for heat.  They can be fresh or dried.  I like to use 2 fresh jalapeños, 1 dried chipotle, and 1 dried habanero, but do whatever you want, ok?  If you don't like spicy stuff, just use 2 mild chiles instead of 1, and forget the hot ones.
  

• A big dutch oven (a.k.a. a cast iron pot, a.k.a. a pot with really big thermal mass and even heating)
• A small pan of any kind but nonstick.

1. Prepare the fresh ingredients.  To do this:
1. Chop the mild peppers into pieces about 1-2 cm square.
2. Chop the fresh chiles into pieces about 5-10 mm square, first discarding seeds and ribs.  (Be careful, okay?)
   
3. Cut the onions into pieces about 5 mm square if you hate big onion pieces, or about 2 cm square if you love big onion pieces.
4. If you're using fresh garlic, mince it or put it through a garlic press.
5. If you're using not-ground beef, then trim it and grind it, or (as I prefer) trim it and cut it into cubes about  1.5 cm on a side.  (You know the drill, right?  Stick the meat in your freezer for about 20 minutes so it firms up, then cut off the big pieces of fat[*], then slice what's left along the longest dimension.  Then slice each of those pieces, so you wind up with a bunch of long thin strips.  Then bunch them all up and slice them into cubes.)
   
2. Make some chili powder.  To do this:
1.  You start by getting your little pan out and toast the cumin seeds, the fennel seeds, the mild chiles, and the hot chiles.  I recommend that you toast each of these separately, since none of them takes more than 20-60 seconds, and they all seem to go at their own speed.  For big stuff (like chiles), chop or crunch them up a little before you toast them, and discard the seeds if you don't want super-spicy.  You'll know something is toasted when you just start to smell it or it just starts to change color, whatever comes first... but be careful about inhaling stuff from chiles, for obvious reasons, ok?
   
2. Take all that stuff you just toasted and grind it.  You do this by taking your backup spices-only coffee grinder and grinding them for a 10-20 seconds or so until they make a coarse flaky powder.  (What, you don't have an extra coffee grinder for spices? Get one.  They cost what, $5?  $10?  You can afford that.  It costs less than a pizza.)
3. Put the chili powder in a cup.  Add other dry spices, including cinnamon (if you're using that), garlic powder (if you're using that), basil, oregano, and pepper.  Cover with beer and stir gently.  It will want to overflow, so add the beer slowly and don't fill the cup all the way at first.
4. Start heating up your big pot over medium-high heat.  Brown[**] the beef in batches[***], and put it all in a bowl or something as it gets finished.
5. Put a little oil[****] in the pot, and add the onions, and stir a bit for a minute or two so they don't burn.  Then add the mild fresh peppers and keep stirring.  Once the onions and peppers start to soften (like, 6-10 minutes) add the fresh chiles and stir some more.  Cook them till they're a little softened, like 2-3 minutes.
   
6. Dump the beef back in.  Stir it in, and let it heat back up for a minute or two.
7. Give the beer-spice mixture another stir, and dump it in.  Stir the pot again, scraping the bottom well, and then turn the heat down to medium.
8. Open up your canned tomatoes and crush them.  It might help to use your hands.  It might help to use a bowl.  Maybe you should have used diced tomatoes if you didn't know how to crush tomatoes.  I hope you weren't wearing a white shirt!  Anyway, dump the newly crushed tomatoes and their juice into the pot.  Stir again.  Add the bay leaf.  Add more liquid (water or beer) if stuff isn't pretty much covered by liquid.
9. At this point, check your refrigerator.  If you have any mostly-empty jars of salsa that you need to get rid of, and they haven't gone bad yet (taste them to be sure!) then dump them into the chili.
10. Turn heat down to a simmer and cover.  Cook.  How long?  At least an hour; 2 or 3 hours would be better.  If liquid levels gets low, add more water or beer.  Stir periodically, so it doesn't stick.
    
11. Uncover and turn heat back up a little so it simmers again.  Add beans, if you're using beans.[*****]
12. Keep stirring.  After 30-60 minutes, when the stuff still seems a little soupier than you'd like, add the chocolate and the corn flour.  At this point you'll need to stir more than you did before: the corn flour will thicken it, but it will also want to burn more than it did before.
13. Stir for another 15-20 minutes.  Take out the bay leaf.  Taste for seasoning, and season as appropriate.  Now it's chili.  Serve with whatever you want: i like rice and cheese.  If you like tortilla chips, that's good too, but you should've used ground beef.  If you want it over spaghetti, then congratulations: you've won the weird contest.[††]
14. Refrigerate or freeze your leftovers.  If anybody tells you you made chili wrong, then act real apologetic and ask them to bring you some of their chili so you can understand what real chili is supposed to taste like.  Score!  Now you have two kinds of chili!

Tags: chili, passive-aggressive, recipe

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