North America · Volume 35, Tex-Mex, the Rio Grande and the Desert Southwest

Chile con carne

Name: Chile con carne
Total time: 6 h
Yield: Serves 6 to 8
Cuisine: Tex-Mex, the Rio Grande and the Desert Southwest
Ingredients: 6 dried ancho chiles, seeded and stemmed; 2 dried pasilla chiles, seeded and stemmed; 2 dried costeño or extra guajillo chiles, seeded and stemmed; 2 dried guajillo chiles, seeded and stemmed; 4 dried chiles de árbol; 4 rashers streaky bacon; 1.8kg chuck roast, cut into 1cm cubes; 1 large onion, diced; 6 cloves garlic, crushed; 250ml brewed coffee; 1 bottle beer; 500ml water; 1 tbsp ground cumin; ½ tsp ground cinnamon; ½ tsp ground clove; ½ tsp ground allspice; 1 tsp ground coriander; ½ tsp cayenne pepper; 2 chipotles in adobo; to taste salt; 60g masa harina; ⅓ tablet Mexican drinking chocolate, grated

Texas

Illustration

Time: 6 hours

Researched: 26 sources cited

Beef in a chile gravy built from real dried pods rather than commercial powder, the defining Texas argument in a bowl: chili as San Antonio's chili queens made it, before Willie Gebhardt turned the shortcut into an industry. Homesick Texan

by Texas

Two cities each tell a founder's story. Santa Fe's version credits Teresa Hernandez, eighteen or nineteen at the time, with bringing her mother's recipe to the Woolworth's lunch counter on the Santa Fe Plaza in the 1960s, slitting a bag of Fritos lengthwise and ladling in homemade red chile con carne, topped with cheddar and onion; she was remembered by name in the Santa Fe press on her death. Texas tells at least two of its own: a folk claim that Daisy Doolin, mother of Fritos inventor Charles Elmer Doolin, invented the dish in San Antonio in the 1930s, and a better-evidenced one, drawn from the Doolin family's own 2011 book, dating the earliest documented Fritos-and-chili recipe to 1949, with the actual authorship unsettled even inside the family's own archive. Frito-Lay's Casa de Fritos restaurant at Disneyland was already selling a "Frito Chili Pie" by 1955. Kaleta Doolin's own conclusion, drawn from company archives few casual retellers have consulted, is the most useful thing this chapter found on the whole dispute: both folk-hero stories, Daisy Doolin's and Teresa Hernandez's, are myths in the strict who-was-first sense, since Frito-Lay itself was already selling the combination-dish concept commercially by 1949, before either individual claim. What survives that correction intact is Hernandez's real, specific role in making the slit-bag street-food format a Santa Fe institution, regardless of who thought of it first. Frito pie, Wikipedia

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 6 to 8. About 6 hours, mostly unattended simmering.

Ingredients

6 dried ancho chiles, seeded and stemmed
2 dried pasilla chiles, seeded and stemmed
2 dried costeño or extra guajillo chiles, seeded and stemmed
2 dried guajillo chiles, seeded and stemmed
4 dried chiles de árbol
4 rashers streaky bacon
1.8kg chuck roast, cut into 1cm cubes
1 large onion, diced
6 cloves garlic, crushed
250ml brewed coffee
1 bottle beer
500ml water
1 tbsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground clove
½ tsp ground allspice
1 tsp ground coriander
½ tsp cayenne pepper
2 chipotles in adobo
to taste salt
60g masa harina
⅓ tablet Mexican drinking chocolate, grated

Method

Toast the dried ancho, pasilla, costeño (or extra guajillo), guajillo and chiles de árbol in a dry cast iron pan, 2 minutes per side, then soak in warm water for 30 minutes.
Fry the bacon, crumble and reserve. Brown the beef in the bacon fat in batches, 2 to 3 minutes per side.
Sauté the onion until clear, add the garlic for a further minute, then return the beef to the pot with the coffee, beer, water, bacon, cumin, cinnamon, clove, allspice, coriander and cayenne pepper.
Purée the soaked chiles with the chipotles and a cup of fresh water, and stir into the pot.
Simmer, uncovered, on low for 5 hours, stirring occasionally.
Grate in the chocolate. Whisk the masa harina into a cup of the hot liquid, stir back in to thicken, and simmer a further 30 minutes.

What a modern chef changes

The same pod purée, engineered for depth rather than left to a long simmer alone.

Rung 1

Method

Pressure cook the beef with the chile purée for 45 minutes at high pressure, then reduce the resulting liquor hard afterward in a wide pan, concentrating in an hour what the traditional method spends five hours building, without losing the long-simmer depth.
Blend the toasted, rehydrated chiles through a high-power blender and pass through a chinois for a completely smooth purée, removing every trace of skin and seed for a sauce with real gloss.

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