Burger Night

My heart may be Minnesotan, but my tongue is Texan.  

Scandinavians drink coffee as transparent as tea, and eat gjetost and lutefisk… I’ll pass.  But garlic, onions, peppers, meat, smoked stuff, salt and simple carbohydrates.  That’s good stuff.

I set out to learn about the origins of chili con carne, but the stories of traditional Texan cuisine(I don’t like the term Tex-Mex) has me exploring and experimenting with the why’s and how’s.

Beside chili con carne, another traditional food during the settling of Texas was the pecan.  Pecans were abundant in the wild, so all it took to sell pecans and pecan related goods was to pick and shell them.

(Yep, pecans up in there.)

One of the most common uses for pecans was with pralines.  One would take the wild pecans, add them to a pot of water and sugar and have candy to sell on the sidewalks.  Such a simple idea.

(Water, a common ingredient in things.)

It seemed too simple.  Sugar, water and pecans?  How could that be anything special?  Well, the process is more delicate that I had thought.  The past couple of weeks I’ve made batch after batch.  One was too watery, another was too hard.  I’ve had trouble keeping the sugar from crystalizing while keeping the mixture thick.  I tried different sugars- brown, evaporated cane juice, Demerara and combinations too. 

The ones that were decent couldn’t be handled.  The others just tasted like you were just chewing on sugar and pecans.  I had to have been missing something- even a desperate cowboy wouldn’t drop a nickel for this crap.

I had to call in the big guns.  I asked Dave Arnold over at Cooking Issues.  His suggestion for eliminating the sugar crystals: minimize agitation.  Every damn recipe I read said to mix in the crystals or “beat until opaque”.  Apparently some folks prefer the sugar crystals in their pralines.  Anyway, Dave was right.  My recent batches I quite literally didn’t touch.  The pot simmers for an hour or so, the candy cools hard and without too many crystals.  

You might think that they’d be painfully sweet, but they don’t come off that way.  But the richer the flavor of the sugar you use, the better off you’ll be with these.  And don’t add the pecans until right before spooning them out- they’ll get soggy and weird.

Up next:  French Fried Potatoes

Sweet ass side note:  

Another moment of simple Texan culinary genius- if you boil this:

(2 bucks at Rainbow)

…for three hours and let cool completely; you get this:

It tastes just like the caramel on caramel apples, but also works remarkably well on a spoon.

As with hamburgers, the exact origin of chili is widely debated.  The most frequent and seemingly most reputable claims say San Antonio, TX is where it began.  In March of 1731, Spaniards held the settlement, then known as Bexar, with the French vying for control.  The Spaniards sent word to their king to send more settlers for support.  The king sent sixteen families, accustomed to spicy foods and garlic, from the Canary Islands.  Their adaptation to the culinary environment found the first recipes for chile con carne.  What exactly those recipes were… no one knows.  

Of course, cowboys greatly popularized chili- and this is where my favorite recipes come from- the chuckwagons.  The recipes of necessity and optimization.  The best method of preserving meats at that time was by salting and drying.  There are accounts of trail men carrying simply dried, salted beef pressed into bricks with chilipiquines(wild peppers).  Alone insufficient for a meal, and to keep their load light, along the frequented trails the travelers would plant onions, garlic and oregano near the rugged mesquite trees- to dissuade animals from stealing their harvest.

(man camped in the mesquite brush near Uvalde, TX)

Sounds good.  Some adjustments seemed prudent.  Here’s 1.7 lbs. of chuck- cut into pieces “the size of pecans”- a descriptive phrase used commonly in old chili recipes:  

To technically cure meats, one needs to add at least 20% of the weight in salt.  Being that I have the luxury of refrigeration and sanity, I opted to tone that down.  Three tablespoons of salt were tossed with the beef bits and set to dry for 3 days:

Commercially produced chilipiquines are spicy as hell(wild, old growth plants produce sweeter fruit), so to make a brew based on that would be suicide.  Subbed in were ancho and dundicut peppers.  First, the beef, onions and garlic were browned, then the rest was added- peppers, cumin, black pepper, Mexican oregano, bay leaves, 6 cups of water and a little corn flour:

After another hour and a half of simmering the meat was tender and the stew thick:

Still a little salty- just from the beef- and it would benefit from a touch of sweetness, but a very unique and intensely rich bowl all the same.  The beans can stay gone forever, but adding tomatoes might be a good idea.  The texture and flavor of the half cured beef was like moist, tender jerky- quite awesome.

Yes, Burger Night will have chili.

Onward and upward.