Chili con carne recipe with photo in light version. How to preserve the taste and flavor of a traditional Mexican dish while reducing its spiciness and fat content?
Contents of the recipe with a photo:
- Ingredients
- Cooking chili con carne step by step
- Video recipes
Chili con carne is a favorite dish of Mexican cowboys, charros, a brutal food of real macho, simple, hearty and hotly spicy. It is one of the culinary symbols of Mexico, like borscht for Ukraine or barbecue for Georgia. However, people who are not used to it are better to start acquaintance with this burning manifestation of Latin American culinary temperament in the most relaxed version of "light".
In fact, it is something like a stew. The main components in the classic recipe for chili con carne are heard in the name itself: chili - the world famous hot pepper, carne - beef. The third must-have is beans or beans. And since this dish comes from a hot country, it necessarily includes a lot of vegetables and spicy herbs.
Instead of dry white beans, which are more delicate in texture, you can take red beans, beans or two cans of canned beans in their own juice, instead of stalked celery - a piece of root (50-70 g) or parsnip root. If you don't have tomato paste at hand, it is permissible to use tomato puree, a glass of tomato juice, fresh or canned tomatoes, after having removed the skin from them.
- Caloric content per 100 g - 120 kcal.
- Servings - 4-5
- Cooking time - 1, 5 - 3, 5 hours
Ingredients:
- Beef, pulp - 400 g
- White beans, grain - 250 g
- Bulb onions - 1-2 pcs. average
- Garlic - 3-4 cloves
- Carrots - 1 pc. large
- Petiolate celery - 2 stalks
- Tomato paste - 2-3 tablespoons
- Bulgarian pepper - 1 pc.
- Eggplant - 1 pc.
- Flour or starch - 2 tablespoons
- Dry sweet parpika - 1 tsp
- Freshly ground pepper mixture - to taste
- Spicy herbs to taste
- Vegetable oil - 2-3 tablespoons
- Salt to taste
Cooking chili con carne step by step
1. It is advisable to sort out dry beans, rinse and pre-soak in clean water for several hours. Soaked beans will cook in an hour, and dry beans will require at least three. Red, if it has not been soaked, must be poured with cold water, brought to a boil, boiled for 5-10 minutes, drained, rinsed, and only then continue to cook in a general way. Ready canned (canned) beans are laid when the meat is ready, along with vegetable frying.
Drain the soaked beans, rinse and fill with cold water in a ratio of 1 to 2. In an authentic recipe, beans or beans are simmered for long hours on the coals of a fire in a thick-walled cast-iron boiler, we can use a cauldron or a slow cooker. Most modern multicooker has a special "Beans" mode, when the heat treatment is carried out very evenly, on the verge of boiling. It is very important: it is strictly forbidden to salt any legumes during cooking until they are fully cooked! Even a minimal amount of salt leads to the fact that the product "freezes" and stops cooking. It is in such cases that rescue advice is required: rinse, change the water, add sugar or baking soda. All these tricks will, of course, make the legumes softer, but the taste and quality of the dish will be irrevocably ruined!
2. If we use dried vegetables (we have eggplant), they must be soaked in warm boiled water. Why use dried or frozen vegetables if store shelves are full of fresh ones all year round? Everyone is free to choose on their own, but to me personally fresh and vigorous fruits outside of their season seem extremely suspicious. Therefore, I would advise everyone who does not have iron health and tinned stomachs of Mexican cowboys to use their own or purchased, but reliable, benign, environmentally friendly blanks.
3. Wash the beef, remove the films, cut into pieces the size of a walnut and dry with a napkin.
4. Heat a thick-bottomed frying pan, pour in a couple of tablespoons of any refined vegetable oil and fry the meat until golden brown. In the traditional recipe, bacon is first fried in a dry frying pan, and then cooked with melted pork fat, but we announced the light version, i.e. should use a minimum of fat.
5. While the meat is fried, prepare the vegetables: chop the onion in half rings, carrots - in short strips.
6. Remove the browned meat with a slotted spoon, letting the fat drain back into the pan. It is on it that we will simmer vegetables.
7. Put the meat on the beans, add a glass of boiling water or hot broth and continue to cook on the same gentle "non-boiling" mode for an hour and a half until the beef is fully cooked. And not a pinch of salt!
8. Over medium heat with constant stirring, begin to fry the onions and carrots. If the vegetables irresistibly tend to stick to the pan, you can add a spoonful of oil, but no more - remember about Light!
9. Cut the celery into small cubes or strips and put in the pan when the onion becomes transparent.
10. After a few more minutes add the bell pepper. Frozen vegetables do not need to be thawed first, we throw them directly into the hot pan.
11. Eggplant comes last. We dump it into the vegetable mixture along with the water in which it was soaked, close the pan with a lid, put it on low heat, and after 10 minutes turn it off altogether. If fresh vegetables are used in the recipe, they are chopped and placed in the pan along with the celery.
12. We took homemade concentrated frozen tomato paste. It needs to be thawed, diluted in 2 times (to the state of thick tomato juice) and mixed with a thickener - flour or starch, the Mexicans allow both options. In European cuisines, flour is fried to thicken sauces so that it acquires a pleasant nutty flavor. But raw flour even when cooked will smell like raw flour, so I advise you to still use starch, but potato or corn is no longer important.
13. Another nuance is the preparation of garlic. If we come across old garlic with pronounced green arrows, it is better to remove them, along with them the unpleasant harshness will go away. And in no case should you grab the garlic press - it is the liquid garlic juice, which reacts with the hot broth, gives that harsh and harsh smell that annoys many. Better to chop the garlic with a knife or use a special mill.
14. When the meat and beans are almost ready, put the stewed vegetables to them, add another glass and a half of boiling water or broth (optional) and cook for 5-10 minutes, so that, as the French chefs say, "the tastes are married."
15. We begin the final "refinement to taste". It is at this moment that hot Mexican guys pour the infusion of chili pepper into the cauldron, throw in finely chopped pods or generously measure out a good lump of hot pepper paste with a large spoon. We are more modest, we will limit ourselves to a few pinches of freshly ground pepper mixture and a teaspoon of dry sweet paprika. The aroma of pepper will be present, but no firefighters' intervention is required.
16. Next, we, finally, salt our stew, lay out the chopped garlic, add dry spicy herbs, pour in a mixture of tomato juice with a thickener, mix thoroughly, let it boil for a minute or two, turn off the heat and let the finished dish brew for a few minutes, to get to full flavor.
Thick, nourishing, aromatic, spicy chili con carne will invigorate, give strength, warm not only the stomach, but also the soul. And the fact that in our variation it turned out to be a bit not quite "chili", rather pretty "light" - I hope hot Mexican charros will not take offense at us, northerners, who are not accustomed to such a culinary fire of passions!
Chili con carne is served scalding hot, sprinkled with any fresh herbs to taste.
Chili con carne video recipes
1. Recipe for chili con carne:
2. How to cook chili con carne in a cauldron:
