Chili Roundup - share your favorite recipe

[Mountain Cowgirl]

Faye's Rockin Double F Roundup Chili

Ingredients

1 32oz can pinto beans
2 lb well-marbled chuck steak
1 32 oz cans of tomato sauce
1 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes
1 large sweet yellow onion
2 garlic cloves
2 tablespoons chili powder
1/8 tsp white pepper
2 tbsp yellow mustard
1 tbsp olive oil
1 7 oz can hot tomato sauce (optional)

Feeds 2 to 4 adults

Preparation

Cut steak into ½" cubes. Leave all the fat. Rub olive oil around in the skillet. Season meat cubes with your favorite steak seasoning and brown. Dice up the onion and garlic. Add to skillet and sauté for a few minutes. Dump all the contents of the skillet into a 4 qt pot. Add the tomato sauce, beans, tomatoes, chili powder, white pepper, and yellow mustard. Stir up, add water to get the consistency you desire, and put on medium until it starts to simmer, and then put heat on low. Sample liquid for taste and add salt, more chili powder, and hot pepper sauce if desired, but add all these in small amounts, stir and taste. I would usually make two pots of chili, one with hot sauce and one mild. Stir up and leave on low for several hours. I always started early so it could cook for 10 hours. Be sure to lid the pot and watch liquid level although on low it should go all day without much loss. If you cannot attend it, just add a bit more water and forget about it until dinner time. I have a 16 qt pot that I have used and just multiplied all the ingredients by 4 and it came out great for filling 12 very large bowls. Serve with hot oven-fresh cornbread and lots of real butter.

Please share your favorite recipe. I love ranch chili cookoffs.

 

[leanin' H]

The key to our best recipe for chili is Anasazi beans from Colorado. Best beans ever!!! We buy them from Adobe Milling in Dove creek. The come in bags and are dry. Y'all can order them and have them shipped to your home

2 Quarts of dry Anasazi beans (Soak in water over night to soften or use insta-pot as directions state)
3 large onions
5 roasted and peeled green Anaheim chilis
tablespoon minced garlic
2 cans of diced tomato's (we like the roasted style)
2 small cans of tomato paste
4-5 diced bell peppers
2 tablespoons of chili powder
Vegetable oil
salt and black pepper
Quart of beef stock
Meat options- 4lbs fresh ground pork, 4lbs of elk burger, 4lbs ground beef, 4lbs ground lamb (We use all four or a combo of each)

Brown meat and remove from cast iron dutch oven.
Add a little oil and chopped onions, garlic and green chilis-cook til onion is translucent
Add meat back in and add tomato's and paste- Add beef stock- simmer
Add beans, chopped bell peppers- salt and pepper to taste
Take off stove top and place in oven to cook for 3-4 hrs on about 275-300 F
Or put a few coals under the Dutch oven and a lot of top if doing over the fire. Change coals and rotate dutch oven 90* every half hour
Serve with sliced sourdough bread- Add a spoonful of sourcream or grated pepperjack cheese
Its a Mexican slant on good old chili. We love it

 

[Mountain Cowgirl]

@leanin' H Have you ever made Basque-style cast iron dutch oven sourdough bread? I made it for years using home ground wheat and a 100-year-old sourdough starter I got from the Basque in Stanley, Idaho. It is awesome to get it banked right in the coals and watch the rising bread lift that heavy cast iron lid.

And the Dove Creek beans, those are the best. I used to drive my mother up to visit a friend that was a Dove Creek bean farmer when we had our ranch in southwest Colorado. We had DC beans year-round. Always a pot on the coal heater. After I left and moved to Montana and then Oregon, I drove through Moab and then turned off toward Cortez and went through Dove Creek. The scenery changes on the trip from Oregon to SW Colorado are spectacular.

I love the Mexican slant on your chili and sometimes put jalapeno or hot chopped-up poblano peppers in mine. The Mexican hot tomato sauce is my lazy way. When I lived in the mountains I always used my cast iron pot over coals in my firepit designed to have a fire going and a place to bank the coals to the side to make fair weather chili. During the winter I used the 3 legged cast iron pot and had it on the wood stove top that burned continually. I just added ingredients as it was used. It did get a heavy iron taste from the tomatoes reacting with the cast iron, so if for others I used my stainless steel pot I still use today. I never minded the iron flavor and it warded off anemia hahaha!