We are creatures of habit at stately IPB Manor, and one of our regular meals is chili. Once a week I make up a huge-assed pot of the stuff, and after gorging on bowls of it atop brown rice and buried under mountains of cheese, the copious quantities of leftovers get packaged up for lunches for the remainder of the week. After several years of tinkering with the big parts of the recipe (the meat, the vegetables, the liquids), I finally decided there was one building block left that would be a lot of fun to play with — the chili powder. After watching an episode of Good Eats about dried chiles, I took Alton Brown’s recipe and ran with it. I use guajillo, arbol, cascabel and chipotles, and liberally apply all of them (Penzey’s Spices is a fantastic source for all the elements of this). I also make boatloads of chili powder at a time; the finished product you see here is being stored in a four-cup spice jar. The process of seeding and cutting up the chiles is brutal — it’s almost as if there are elements to these peppers that could be used as weapons or something… But suffering the burning eyes and nasal passages, the spine-rattling fits of sneezing, the coughing so hard you think a lung is going to come up, is all worth it, because this chili powder makes the stuff from the grocery store taste like mildly spicy sand. My homemade chili powder is fresh, fruity and flowery, with a kicky, lemony edge of cumin and a complexity from the four chiles that is deep, smoky and robust. If you’ve got a spice grinder you’re not afraid to use for something spicy and you’re not particularly attached to the mucous membranes in your head, this is a project well worth undertaking.
August 12, 2007...1:42 am
IPB Caliente!
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7 Comments
August 12, 2007 at 10:21 am
Oh. Wow. Yum.
The end.
August 12, 2007 at 12:53 pm
You’re going to try make this yourself now, right? Because in the new, unstocked kitchen you’ve got all the components, right? Right?
August 12, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Right. All I need is the aforementioned spices, a jar, and a grinder.
August 12, 2007 at 7:54 pm
That’s a very small hurdle, I think!
August 13, 2007 at 12:08 am
Any chance you will post your chili recipe? I’ve always wanted to make it but am fearful that most of the recipes I find online will taste horrible.
August 13, 2007 at 9:41 am
Watch this space, kms2! For you, I’ll do a chili post this week!!
December 11, 2007 at 3:44 pm
[...] it stretches one pot to make leftover lunches for the entire week. I didn’t have any of my own chili powder on hand, but thank heavens for those freebies Penzey’s Spices includes with every order [...]