Chilli con Carne
Beef mince simmered for two hours in a paste of toasted, soaked dried chillies, with beans added late and finished with dark chocolate and lime.
- Prep
- 30 min
- Cook
- 2 hr 45 min
- Total
- 3 hr 15 min
- Serves
- 6
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Celery
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Method
Toast the ancho and chipotle chillies in a dry pan over medium heat for about 40 seconds, pressing them flat, until they smell toasty and darken slightly. Watch them — scorched chillies make the whole pot bitter and cannot be fixed.
Tear the stalks and seeds out, cover the chillies with the 400ml boiling water and leave to soak for 20 minutes.
Toast the cumin and coriander seeds in the same dry pan for 30 seconds, then grind them.
Lift the softened chillies into a blender with 200ml of their soaking liquid and blend to a smooth paste, keeping the rest of the liquid.
Heat the oil in a heavy casserole and brown the mince hard in three batches, setting each aside. Crowd the pan and it steams grey, and the browned crust is most of the flavour.
Soften the onions in the fat for 8 minutes, then add the garlic, tomato purée, ground spices, oregano and smoked paprika and cook for 2 minutes.
Return the mince with the chilli paste, chopped tomatoes, stock and the remaining soaking liquid, and bring to a simmer.
Simmer uncovered on the lowest heat for 2 hours, stirring now and then. It should bloop lazily once every few seconds; if it hisses or spits the base will catch.
Stir in the drained kidney beans and simmer for a final 30 minutes, until a spoon dragged across the base leaves a channel that fills back slowly.
Off the heat, stir in the cider vinegar, lime juice, dark chocolate and salt. The chocolate adds bitterness and body, not a chocolate flavour; the vinegar and lime stop the richness sitting on the palate.
Taste for salt — two and a half hours of reducing moves the target a long way — and serve with rice, soured cream and raw onion.
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What to expect
- Taste
Deep, sweet and smoky before it is hot. The ancho gives raisin and prune, the chipotle gives smoke, and the heat arrives last and low in the throat rather than sharp on the tongue. Under it there is a savoury, almost meaty bitterness from the toasted spice and the chocolate.
- Aroma
Toasted cumin and smoked chilli, with the sweetness of long-cooked onion under it. The moment the dried chillies hit the dry pan is the best smell in the recipe and lasts about forty seconds.
- Texture
Soft grains of meat in a thick, slightly rough sauce, with the beans giving a floury softness that breaks against it. Nothing should be watery and nothing should be pasty.
- Sound
Almost none, and that is the tell. A chilli at the right simmer makes one lazy bloop every few seconds. If it is hissing or spitting the heat is too high and the base will catch.
- How the flavour moves
Sweet and fruity first, then smoke, then savoury depth, and finally a heat that builds over several mouthfuls and does not spike. The lime at the end is what stops the richness sitting on the palate.
- Serve it
Hot but not scalding, in a bowl that has been warmed. Cold soured cream on top is deliberate and the contrast is half the dish.
- Goes with
Plain white rice, cornbread or a baked potato. Something sour and cold alongside — soured cream, or a sharp cheese. A dark beer or a simple red with no oak.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Easy, with one moment of judgement: the chillies must be toasted and not scorched.
- Cost
Low. Mince, tinned tomatoes and tinned beans, plus a bag of dried chillies that will do four batches.
- Equipment
A heavy casserole, a dry frying pan and a blender or stick blender.
- When to make it
A Sunday afternoon, or any day you want to cook once and eat three times.
- Best season
None. A cold-weather dish by temperament rather than by ingredient.
- You know it is done when
A spoon dragged across the base leaves a channel that fills back slowly rather than instantly, and a slick of orange-red fat sits on the surface. If liquid pools around the mince when you stop stirring, it needs longer.
- And it feels like
Thick enough to sit on a fork, with the mince in soft separate grains rather than clumps, and the beans whole.
- Food safety
Nothing unusual. Mince must be cooked through, and it is by a wide margin here. Cool leftovers within two hours, in a shallow container rather than the pot, which takes most of a night to lose its heat.
- Where it goes wrong
- Scorching the dried chillies in the dry pan, which makes the whole pot bitter and cannot be corrected.
- Browning all the mince at once, so it steams grey and the crust — most of the flavour — never forms.
- Adding the beans at the start, where two hours of simmering turns them to paste.
- Cooking it for an hour instead of two and wondering why it is thin.
- Under-salting at the end. Two and a half hours of reduction moves the target a long way.
- If it does go wrong
Thin: take the lid right off and simmer harder for 20 minutes. Bitter: the chillies caught; a teaspoon of sugar and a little more tomato will mask it but not remove it. Harsh and one-note: it needs the vinegar and the lime, which are doing the job of cutting the richness. Greasy: skim the surface, or chill it overnight and lift the set fat off.
- Making it ahead
Ideal. Make it a day or two ahead and reheat gently; the flavours settle and the texture improves.
- Keeping it
Four days covered in the fridge, and genuinely better on days two and three.
- Reheating
Low heat with a splash of water, stirring, until it steams. It thickens considerably in the fridge.
- Freezing
Freezes very well for three months. The beans soften a little on thawing and nothing else changes.
- Leftovers
Over a baked potato, in a toasted wrap with cheese, or under a crust of cornbread baked in the oven for 25 minutes.
- Scaling it
Doubles cleanly in a big enough pot. Brown the mince in more batches rather than bigger ones.
- Substitutions
Guajillo can replace ancho, and is a little sharper and less sweet. If dried chillies are genuinely unavailable, use 3 tbsp of a good chilli powder blend added with the smoked paprika, and accept that it is a different and flatter dish. Chuck steak in 2cm cubes works instead of mince and needs 3 hours rather than 2.
- Dietary swaps
No declared allergens in the chilli itself; the celery and sulphites come from shop-bought beef stock, and a stock without them makes it free of both. Dairy free if the soured cream is left off. Gluten free, egg free and nut free as written, though a stock cube should be checked.
- Shopping for it
Ancho and chipotle chillies come from Mexican or general international grocers and keep for a year in a sealed bag. Supermarket 'chipotle paste' is a reasonable stand-in for the chipotle alone.
- Keeping the cost down
Standard mince rather than steak mince — the fat is wanted. A bag of dried chillies from an international grocer costs little and does several batches.
- Sustainability
Beef has the highest greenhouse gas footprint of any common protein by a wide margin, and there is no way to write around that. What this recipe does have is a structure that takes cutting well: the chilli paste, the aromatics and the beans carry most of the flavour, so halving the mince to 450g and adding a third tin of beans gives a dish that is recognisably the same and is the single most effective change available. Dried beans cooked from scratch rather than tinned reduce packaging and cost, at the price of a night's soaking.
- Nutrition
High in protein and fibre, and the fat can be reduced considerably by chilling and lifting the set layer off before reheating.
- Worth it?
The twenty minutes spent soaking chillies is the entire difference between this and the version everyone has already had.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Texas, and San Antonio in particular, in the second half of the nineteenth century.
- Also called
Chili con carne in American usage, and often just 'a bowl of red'.
- Said out loud
CHIL-ee kon KAR-nay.
- What the name means
Chilli with meat. The name describes what is in it and, read strictly, describes what is not: no beans and no tomato.
- History
The dish is bound up with San Antonio's Military Plaza, where women known as the Chili Queens sold it from open-air stalls from the 1880s until the stands were closed on public health grounds in the 1930s. Commercial chilli powder, developed in Texas in the same period, turned a dish that required dried chillies into one that required a tin, and that is what carried it across the United States and then abroad.
- Why it matters
The state dish of Texas, and a genuine point of local pride, which is why the argument about beans is not really about beans. Elsewhere it is one of the most-cooked household dishes there is — a big pot, cheap, and better reheated.
- When it is eaten
Feeding a crowd, watching something, cooking on a Sunday for the week. It is not a dinner-party dish and does not want to be.
- The traditional way
Dried chillies rehydrated and ground to a paste, and cubed rather than minced beef, simmered for hours.
- How it changed
Chilli powder replaced whole chillies; mince replaced cubed chuck; beans and tomatoes were added as it moved north and east, largely because they made a small amount of meat feed more people.
- Regional variations
Texan chilli usually has no beans and no tomato, and is often made with cubed beef. Cincinnati chilli is spiced with cinnamon and allspice and served over spaghetti. New Mexican versions lean on green chillies rather than dried red ones. British and Australian versions are the tomato-and-bean kind, which is what this recipe is.
- How this version differs
Beans and tomato are in, which makes this the widespread version rather than the Texan one. The dried chillies are the Texan half kept: they are the one thing that makes the dish taste of chilli rather than of paprika, and they cost nothing but twenty minutes of soaking.
- Sources and credit
No individual. The Chili Queens of San Antonio are the closest thing the dish has to named originators, and they were many women over several decades.
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