Rich, hearty and filling with a bit of heat, filled with tender beans and perfectly roasted vegges, it’s a fantastic way to warm up and fill your belly on a cool night. Oven roasting the vegges helps to ensure a deeper, richer flavour at the end, and removes a good deal of their moisture, keep the chili from thinning out, and reduces the cooking time of the chili itself, which means less stirring and less chance of scorching. It’s completely worth it, i assure you. This post may seem long and the directions very involved, but that is simply because i provide you with multiple options for cooking the chili, not because it’s a complex recipe, it’s actually very simple so don’t be scared.
The ingredients here are actually pretty simple, the base is (mex) red chili paste, which provides most of our flavour here, then we have vegetable broth (or the liquid from home cooked beans) for the liquid, some saltiness, and umami, some fire roasted tomatoes to bring in some acidity and body, peanut butter for richness, umami, and to bring in some creaminess (you can also use sunflower seed or soy butter here if you’re avoiding peanuts), and an assortment of vegges to roast and cooked beans (hopefully homemade, but canned will do.) As a heads up, the photos here are for a double batch, so try and keep that in mind if you’re using them as a guide for cut sizes and such.
Now, assuming you have your red chili paste ready (if you don’t, do that first), you’re gonna start with roasting the vegges, which takes a while, but like i mentioned before, is totally worth it. You want to spread them out on a parchment lined baking tray, if you’re able to get them in a single layer the roasting will go much quicker, if they’re sort of doubled up (like in the picture here) that’s okay too, they’ll just take a little longer in the oven.
You want to roast them until they’ve reduced in size by half and have some beautiful browned and slightly blackened edges showing. If you don’t roast them long enough they will have too much moisture remaining and your chili will be watered down in the end. You don’t want that, so be patient here and use your eyes as the guide and not your timer. Okay? Okay.
Now you just stir everything together and cook! See? That wasn’t so bad.
Your work is pretty much done, the rest is mostly hands off (assuming you’re NOT cooking this on the stove top, which i really recommend against.) Chili is always one of those things i’m paranoid about, even just a little scorching (which is SO easy to have happen) will permeate through the whole batch and for some (like us) render it inedible. So i’ve devised several cooking methods over the years to prevent this atrocity from happening and destroying my precious chili, using a (ceramic/stoneware) slow cooker, roasting the chili in the oven (it’s already hot from the vegges after all), and using an electric pressure cooker with the pot-in-pot method. These will all yield strikingly similar end results, with only minor differences. The slow cooking will typically yield more tender beans and vegges, the oven roasting will tend to be a tad sweeter and richer, and the electric pressure will be somewhere smack dab in the middle of the other two. In reality, these differences are actually very subtle, so the choice is yours here on which method to use based on time, preference and available equipment.
However you decide to make it, you’ll love it. Served up in a big bowl, naked, with crackers, or your favorite chili fixins, piled high over spaghetti cincinnati style with shredded cheese. Maybe you like it on fries, or over burritos, maybe layered over polenta or cornbread, perhaps smothering some nachos and drizzled in queso….the possibilities are only limited to your imagination here. Also, this freezes really well, so don’t be afraid to make larger batches (we usually double it and freeze some for later) it will keep for at least 6 months in the freezer.
One final note (that i sincerely hope you do not have to refer to) IF the dreaded scorching happens, DO NOT stir anything, quickly grab another large pot and pour your chili into that, leaving the scorched grossness on the bottom of the pan. This may be your salvation here if it hasn’t had time to infuse into the rest of the chili. Whatever you do, don’t scrape that nasty foulness into your chili.
2 comments
This looks great! Thank you!! What can I swap if I don’t make the red chili paste recipe?
Thanks Toni! It’s one of my favorite recipes 🙂 Unfortunately there isn’t anything you can sub for the chili paste, it is the base for the whole chili. It used to just be a part of the recipe, but i discovered so many other uses for it that it’s now it’s own beast. You don’t need to make the paste ahead, you can actually make it in less time than it takes to roast the vegges, if you make a full batch then you can freeze half for another batch of chili later, or use it to make coney sauce (which i will be posting later this week.) There will also be recipes soon for enchilada sauce and a vegan tex mex pasta dish that use the chili paste as well, so it’s totally worth the time i promise!
Comments are closed.