Linda Falkenstein
Cooking on the Goodman Center's awesome stove.
Last Saturday, I entered my first ever cooking contest, the sixth annual Alliance for Animals Vegan Chili Cookoff.
This is surprising for a few reasons. First, I'm not vegan. Secondly, I'm not a huge fan of contests. Finally, I don't really juggle cooking tasks, combined with serving a lot of people food, all that well. You know all those couples on House Hunters on HGTV who are looking for a place with a bigger kitchen so they can really entertain because they love to have their friends over? I am not one of those people. Having one or two people over for dinner is fine. A guest list larger than that and my palms start to sweat.
However, after having judged a couple of cooking contests in recent years -- the vegan cook-off a few years back, and more recently at a benefit for the Yahara River Grocery Co-op in Stoughton -- chili cook offs began to seem less like contests and more like fun. And in the process of experimenting with veggie burgers for the "Rebuilding the Burger" article, I started to like the idea of recipe creation.
The range of tastes that can still be considered "chili" is large and contains multitudes. That was certainly true at this year's Vegan Chili Cookoff. The nice thing about using chili to suggest "Hey, vegan meals taste good" to people who normally eat meat, but who may want to eat fewer animal products, is that chili is easily made vegan -- leave out the meat and don't sprinkle any cheese on top and you're there.
That said, "just leaving the meat out" was not the philosophy of the six cooks who entered the 2009 cook-off (some of whom are vegan and some not). Inventive ingredients provided big flavor. Sarah Strahler's "Chili, Squashed" thrived on its sweet butternut squash; Cory Johnson's bright "Chili Con Carnival" had green, red and yellow peppers added late in the cooking process so they retained both a little bite and their beautiful colors. Rachel Pfeiffer's "Wicked Spicy Three-Way with Seitan" had, I think, a lot -- a lot -- of purple onions as its starter. Marcelle Richards' "Holy Mole Seitanic Chili" was based on a vast array of different chilies from the Dane County Farmers' Market, with dark chocolate in the mix. And Mark Dwyer's "Magischer Klumpiger Furz-Chili" tasted great -- but is perhaps best left untranslated.
I know these things because we were all in the kitchen of the Goodman Center cooking together at the big six burner stove. This is a super stove. My stove at home is, well, an old electric model with very little oomph. The Goodman stove is a Ferrari of stoves. We learned quickly that a little flame would do.
Despite the tight quarters, ingredients forgotten at home, pots that were too small to hold three gallons of chili or, conversely, a pot that was plenty large enough but filled with ingredients that yielded only about a gallon of chili (my major misstep), we all managed to get servings into the six crockpots in time for the judges to taste at 5:30 p.m.. The judges had their fill. The hungry public began lining up for food.
A jolly oompah band began to play -- "Lonely Goatherd," "Roll Out the Barrel" and, I think, "If You Want to Be a Badger," among others. There was quite a turnout and the cooks had to keep their crockpots filled. I ran out of chili. Sarah ran out of chili. Eventually everyone ran out of chili. No problem -- there was a table full of vegan desserts, including a wonderful banana cake and some of the best peanut butter cookies I've ever had. The band played on.
Then the winners were announced. Marcelle Richards and Mark Dwyer tied in winning the "people's choice" award, while my chili won the "judges' favorite" award. I was, I have to say, really surprised and gratified. I think everyone likes to know that something they cooked made people happy. I just felt bad that I had misunderestimated how much I was making.
The hardest thing about coming up with an actual recipe was quantifying amounts, since when making chili I usually just "eyeball" ingredients and then adjust to taste. In my original scribblings I have such amounts as "a good, good handful of cilantro," which might mean something to me but is not really helpful in terms of conveying to others how much cilantro to use. But here is (as close as I can get) my recipe as I cooked it on Saturday.
"Half Century Chili" recipe
Chop one medium onion fine and sauté in 1 tablespoon vegetable oil. As the onion becomes translucent, add 1 tsp. cumin, 1 tsp. salt, and 1 tablespoon of Aleppo pepper (mine was from Penzey's).
Add: chopped tomatillos (four large, or more if smaller), chopped head of celery, 2 cups baby bella mushrooms. Now come the chopped peppers. I used two poblano, four large jalapenos (with seeds), two green bell and one yellow bell pepper. Add to the mix.
The "a good, good handful of cilantro" turns out to be close to a full bunch as sold at the market. I pick out the heavy stems and chop the rest in the food processor, because knives and I don't work well together, then add to the mix.
Add three 16 oz. cans of diced tomatoes and one can of tomato paste. Add 2 cups of water and a cup of cold, strongly brewed coffee.
Beans -- I like to use a mix of black beans and white beans. For this chili I used four cups of cannellini and two cups of black beans.
As the chili cooks and flavors blend, add the rest of the spices and adjust other spices to taste*. 1/2 tsp. of cinnamon and maybe a teaspoon, at least, of galangal (also from Penzey's), and more salt and some sugar (possibly 1/4-1/2 of a teaspoon), to taste.
* I will also admit that on Saturday I was dumping in spices liberally toward the end of the cooking, in order to balance what I was perceiving as too much heat from the peppers.