Texas Chili | RV Cooking & Healthy RV Recipes #27

What's up guys it's Christine with Irene Iron Fitness and today I'm going to show you how I make my Texas chili. Keep watching. So Texas chili, this is a throwback recipe of mine. This is actually the very first recipe that I created while Aaron and I hit the road and we went straight to Texas and I made Texas chili. What is a Texas chili? It is basically a chili that does not have tomatoes and does not have legumes. So if you're not a traditional chili fan this is up your alley. It's basically just meat and flavoring, spices, chili peppers. So getting straight into our ingredients these guajillo peppers are going to be the star of the show. They are the flavoring for the base. I have some of these dried. We're going to be toasting them, rehydrating them and working those into the sauce. Next of course we have some meat. We have a beef chuck roast. Now this is an ingredient that I use once in a while and I say that only because it's a little bit higher in fat. It is a fattier meat which is what makes it great for low and slow dishes like this one is. And it's also a really good deal. It's affordable. I know a lot of families like to buy these when they're on sale and this is a great recipe for you to use it in a way that's not just your straight up pot roast in a crock pot. That can get redundant. So if you want to shake things up this is a great way to use your chuck roast. So we're going to use chuck roast and that's cut into roughly one inch size cubes. You want them to be bite size so as you're taking a bite of chili it's a comfortable bite and not ginormous in your mouth. Next we have diced white onion and garlic. A lot of garlic. For our spice mix we have smoked paprika, cumin, salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper. So if you don't like the spice go easy on the cayenne. We will be using beef bouillon cubes so you could use a beef stock, beef broth. I like these cubes because they are van friendly. I'm going to end up using about three cups of stock. Apple cider vinegar at the end. We're going to put this in for a little bit of a kick. If you have regular white wine vinegar that would also work. And some cornstarch to thicken up our chili. So this recipe is a little bit, it's time consuming. A lot of the time just goes into simmering the chili at the end once you've got it all together. First things first we're going to start these chilies up by toasting them and rehydrating them. So you're just going to stick your chilies straight in. We're going to toast them on both sides and toasting them is going to release some of the oils in the chilies and make them more flavorful. You want to be careful that you don't burn them because that will make them bitter so it's not going to take long. I can smell them already. Just think of it as waking them up. So these dried chilies are very affordable. You can get a big bag for like four dollars, five dollars, six dollars and it will last you many recipes. And you'll find them in the Hispanic aisle. I find them at Costco. I find them at Sam's Club and they're really easy to work with. So you just got to work past that intimidation factor. I know the first time that I used them I was a little intimidated because I've never worked with dried peppers before. So they're pretty easy to use and this is a great gateway recipe to start using dried chilies. They're starting to get hot and toasty. I'm starting to see some steam rising so I'm going to pull them out because like I said you don't want them to burn. So I have here some hot near boiling water. You just want to pour it into a bowl. You want to make sure that your peppers are completely submerged in the water and once you have your water on just throw a cover on or a plate on top just to make sure that they do stay submerged in the water. And you want to let them go for like 30 minutes to bring them to life. And while that's rehydrating we are going to start browning the beef. Alright so first thing first we're going to start searing off our beef. Just put a little bit of oil in your pan. It's going to be smoking. Probably going to set off some fire alarms today. And you want to season your beef with salt and pepper. So one side is browned. You just want to flip it over so you get every little cube browned on both sides. And you want to do this step in batches. You do not want to overcrowd your pan because if you do then your beef is just going to sit there and steam cook off of each other. And you want a nice sear because brown food tastes better. So while the beef is browning I'm going to do a couple other side tasks so that I can multitask. First I'm going to whip up my beef broth. So I'm going to use more of my hot water. So I'm just going to measure out enough for three cups. I'm going to put my bouillon cubes in there and I'm just going to let that dissolve so that by the time I need my stock it's ready to use. Again I'm just using these little cubes because they pack really well in the van. They don't take up space and they don't add a lot of weight. So we'll just get this in here and mix it up. Also while the beef is browning I'm going to work with my peppers. What you want to do next is carefully remove them from the water and get a paring knife. You want to take the tops off. Those are just going to get discarded and you want to take the seeds out. So I like to just run my knife down the side to open it up and you see all those seeds in there. The easiest way to get rid of those is to just run them under some water. Low running water just like that and put them aside. So I'm going to do that with all of my chilies while my beef is going and then they'll be ready to use. I have all of this water in here that we used to rehydrate. I'm going to hang on to that just in case I need some extra water or stock because there's a lot of flavor in there. So don't throw that away quite yet. All right so the chilies look like this now. Nice and clean. When you run them under the water and you remove the seeds you want to be careful that you don't damage the flesh inside. You want to leave as much of that flesh in the pepper. Don't scrub it away with the seeds. Next we're going to use our immersion blender and we're going to blend these up with our spices and I'm going to use a little bit of this water that I told you to reserve just to help loosen up the mixture. So I have to use this as my immersion cup because my original immersion blender cup I dropped it and I broke it. Story of my life. So now I just have to improvise and use this. I don't know how well it's going to work. We'll just start maybe with half of the peppers. Put in a little bit of this liquid just to give it some room to zhuzh it around and I'm going to throw all the spices in there. Let me flip the beef really quick. Definitely getting nice and brown in here. Getting nice and smoky in here. So let's give this a go. Put some more water in. All right and there's definitely room in here for me to put the rest of the peppers. You can see how vibrant this is. It smells delicious. You can smell the smokiness of the peppers and that's all it takes to work with these peppers. Can you see that in there? And that's what's going to go into our sauce and make it really flavorful, really vibrant and those peppers, as I said, super affordable and they are the key to good Tex-Mex and Mexican food. So get comfortable with it. Just play around with them. If you don't have an immersion blender you can use a regular food processor. I like my blender because you can use it with multiple attachments so it's multifunctional in an RV which is key. All right let's get these last of our beef out of the pot. We're going to get the onions in and that's the hard work. The hard part's over. The searing the and working with the chilies. That's the big part of the prep. So this is going to be smooth sailing from here on out. Next we're going to add in the garlic. Careful not to burn it and it's only going to take a couple minutes. Next after the garlic you want to have your cornstarch nearby. So we're going to add that in next. Cornstarch is great. I use it rarely but when I do add it to a dish it's really nice. It adds a nice thickening agent. Nice and velvety. It's going to make a really nice sauce for this chili. So we're going to do a couple tablespoons and we're going to whisk that in with our stock. And when you're mixing this all together you want to scrape up all those brown bits at the bottom of your pan from searing all of the beef down there. My pan started off pretty much black right now and you're going to scrape all those bits up. Get it into your mixture and it's going to be super concentrated with flavor. You want to make sure you whisk out all of the lumps of the cornstarch. Make it super smooth. Keep working it. But we're actually having friends over for dinner tonight and this really is a great dish for company because it does take work on the front end but it's perfect for entertaining because by the time my guests arrive this is just going to be sitting and simmering and I'm going to be sitting with my feet up looking like a pro. And this looks really good. So now we're going to add in this chili paste which just looks more and more beautiful the more I see it. Can you see that color when the sun hits it? It's just pure flavor. So we're going to add that in and like I said there's no tomatoes in here so if you have people that don't like tomatoes it's really it's really good for like picky eaters because it's just meat and peppers. So I'm going to turn my heat down to low. So the chili paste is in and remember that has all the seasoning right in with it. Next we're going to take our beef and add our beef back in and that's it. We're just going to put the lid on it. You're going to let it simmer and the beef is going to get nice and tender as it sits and simmers. So I'm going to take this liquid from the peppers. If you do use your liquid from your peppers make sure that you strain out the seeds from it and that's it. So we're going to put my lid on and let it go. Let it simmer for a couple hours. We'll check back in with you once it's been simmering. All right it has been simmering for a couple of hours so the last step is to add in some vinegar. We're going to do that now. It smells so good in here and just add a couple tablespoons. Mix it in and really the sauce has gotten a lot more vibrant in color. It's deepened up, smells a lot more intense and it's a little bit thicker. So let's get a close-up of this if you can and that's it. So for this spread I have corn tortillas, I have cilantro lime rice, I did just jasmine rice with a lot of lime juice, a lot of cilantro and some salt. Mix it all up. I have cheese, more cilantro on the side, jalapenos, avocados. If you're going to serve avocados hit them with some lime juice, some salt and pepper. Your guests will thank you. And lime wedges and sour cream. So those are the condiments that I'm putting on. If it was just something for Aaron and myself I'd probably limit it down to what exactly we want but this way people can have what they want. When you have leftovers use the sauce to marinate chicken or marinate a different meat and it'll be really flavorful then to put on a grill or saute up or I really like to drizzle it over omelets or on a salad. So even if you pick all the delicious meat out of there take that sauce and use it for something else. Now when you serve this you can serve it traditionally in a chili, in a bowl and eat it like a chili or you can serve it as a taco or you can serve it as a rice bowl. I hope you enjoyed this recipe. Hit that like, hit that subscribe and meet me next Wednesday for a new healthy recipe. Thanks so much for watching. See you next time.