Dark chocolate makes this delicious Chili con Carne recipe taste extra special! Watch the video and see how easy it is to make this amazing chili and get the recipe below.
One of the nation’s favorites, Chili Con Carne, it’s very simple and very quick to make, minced beef, kidney beans, paprika, a little cumin, cayenne pepper, rich beef stockpot. And then we have our tomato base, which is our very easy tomato sauce. If you don’t have tomato sauce then what you will have to do is fry your onions, your garlic and then add 50% tomatoes and 50% tinned chopped tomatoes, it’s as simple as that. What I do is I make a very easy tomato sauce, it’s my base to my bolognese to my chili con carne, to many things. It’s easy, it’s simple but I make a very big batch and then I break it down into four or five pots and I freeze it so when I want to make some chili con carne, it comes out of the freezer so it’s easy and peasy, you don’t have to start chopping onions, chopping garlic.
So, how do we start? A little olive oil and then we take our minced beef - one kilo of lean, fine minced beef. So, now what I’m doing is I’m sealing it off. By doing that I’m removing the fat, it’ll render out and then start to cook my meat. What’s interesting, we have one kilo of meat and you may think that’s a lot, but just look what’s happening. The water is being released from the meat and that’s a large percentage of that meat. So have we really got a kilo of meat? No, we haven’t. Once the water has evaporated, then you can singe your mince. So it’s quite a long and slow process but the results pay off at the end and there’s nothing worse than when you get mince and it’s got those big lumps in it, almost like meatballs but very tough, not nice. So this way it now will cook nice and evenly in the pan. You can see, the water’s evaporated and now the natural fat and that little bit of olive oil will start to now singe the meat. Now, I take a little cayenne pepper, a little bit of cumin and again you make it as spicy as you wish. Take a little paprika. See, when you think paprika, cayenne, a bit of cumin, they all work fantastically well together. So then we add it to our base tomato sauce, half a liter of water, two rich beef stockpots. Dissolve the stockpots in the chili. When it comes to the boil, simmer very gently for about one hour with the lid on but keep on stirring, you have to mother it.
So the chili’s now been cooking for 50 minutes, so you can see the richness of the rich beef, with the kidney beans, in this case they’re tinned, which have been washed off. I think you have to be generous with the kidney beans, just work those in slowly. Because they were cooked already, all we have to do is put the heat into them, it’s as simple as that. So to finish, fresh chillies, a little bit of dark chocolate, minimum 70% and fresh coriander at the last minute and then all you do is just stir it in. As you see, also the chocolate gives it that little bit of extra richness, it just thickens it a little bit. And the reason I put it all in at the last minute is so it retains its freshness and you can taste the individual flavors, you can taste the chilli, you can taste the coriander, you can taste the chocolate, just that little scent of it. And just to finish, a little more fresh coriander just to make it look pretty. And there we have it, chili con carne with the rich beef stockpot. It’s fantastic with baked potatoes, sour cream. It’s fantastic with rice. It’s your choice, a little cheese, everything goes in the world of gastronomy (continue watching the video for full audio).
Chili Con Carne
Serves 8-10
2 tbsp olive oil
2 1/4 pounds lean, finely minced beef
Pinch of paprika
Pinch of cayenne pepper
Pinch of ground cumin
4 1/4 cups Marco’s Foolproof Tomato Sauce
2 cups water
2 Knorr Rich Beef Stock Pots
2 15-ounce cans of kidney beans in water, drained and rinsed
1 handful of roughly chopped fresh coriander
2–3 mild red chillies, chopped
1 ounce dark chocolate (70% cocoa content), chopped
