Another Chili Con Carne
A concoction of various chile recipes that my wife and I can both live with. Easy to make and you can adjust the spices as it cooks.
A concoction of various chile recipes that my wife and I can both live with. Easy to make and you can adjust the spices as it cooks.
- 1 28-oz can crushed tomatoes
- 1 lb ground beef
- 2 onions chopped
- 1 tb worcestershire sauce
- 1/2 ts oregano
- 1/2 lb sausage meat
- 5 cloves garlic sliced thinnly
- 1 tb chili powder
- 2 cubes beef boullion crushed
- 4 hot pepper rings *
- 1 dash louisianna hot sauce or other hot sauce
- 1/2 ts paprika
- 1/8 ts ground cumin
- 1/8 ts cayenne pepper
- 1 14-oz can red kidney beans
- Carbohydrate 38.7216131267054 g
- Cholesterol 216.25113875 mg
- Fat 74.3069150005229 g
- Fiber 10.9561314409466 g
- Protein 55.8130825063825 g
- Saturated Fat 27.9944007374421 g
- Serving Size 1 1 Serving (646g)
- Sodium 1180.83169398151 mg
- Sugar 27.7654816857588 g
- Trans Fat 16.6467418595866 g
- Calories 1044 calories
Step-by-step
- Combine sausage meat, ground beef, onions and garlic in skillet and brown.
- Place all ingredients in slow cooker and cook on low - medium for 6 - 8 hours, stirring and tasting occasionally. As the flavours meld you may want to add more hot sauce and/or cayenne pepper to suit your tast.
- My wife doesn''t like food as spicy as I do so we try to come to a happy medium as it is cooked.
- I use the same type of hot pepper rings you normally get for your sausage on a bun at varous street venders.
A printed inventory of ground meats, canned tomatoes, and dried spices reveals nothing about how prolonged low-temperature exposure transforms raw produce into a cohesive sauce. While canned tomatoes provide immediate acidity and bulk, they lack the volatile aromatic compounds found in fresh, unpeeled nightshades, which require hours of steady heat to break down their pectin walls and release naturally sweet glutamates.
- Slice the garlic as thinly as possible rather than mincing it; paper-thin slices dissolve entirely into the rendered fats during the browning stage, imparting a mellow background sweetness instead of sharp, pungent pockets of raw allicin.
- Brown the ground beef and sausage mixture in a heavy-bottomed cast iron skillet over medium-high heat until deep mahogany crusts form on the meat particles, because this Maillard reaction generates hundreds of savory flavor compounds that simple boiling inside a slow cooker cannot replicate.
- Maintain a slow cooker temperature setting that keeps the liquid at a very gentle simmer between 180 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing the collagen in the sausage meat to gelatinize slowly without tightening the muscle fibers into tough pellets.
- Incorporate ground spices like cumin and cayenne directly into the browning meat fat during the final minute of skillet cooking to bloom their fat-soluble aromatic oils before transferring everything to the vessel.
Extended simmering allows capsaicin from hot pepper rings and cayenne to bind with the fats present in the beef and sausage, distributing capsaicin molecules evenly across the palate so the heat registers as a smooth warmth rather than a sharp sting. Adjusting seasonings incrementally over a six to eight hour window ensures the salt concentration remains balanced as moisture slowly evaporates through the lid.
