veggie chili: a test of your cooking instincts
and a truth universally acknowledged about relationships
In every relationship where only one person seriously cooks, the other masters one or two perfect dishes. Depending on where you fall on the romantic-to-cynic spectrum, it’s a way of saying, “Hey, I want to feed you, too” or, “Hey, I’m just as capable. I don’t need you.”
I write about my family a lot in this newsletter; they taught me my reverence for food, they taught me that food and family are intertwined, and they taught me how to cook. But while I’m often writing about my dad and the way he runs his kitchen like a restaurant, today is about my mom: Her instincts, how they’ve shaped mine, and how, in turn, they can hone yours.
While my mom doesn’t cook often, she’s a discerning eater and a fantastic cook when she wants to be. She loves almost all food, as long as it tastes good. Her bar for good is quite high, which might be demoralizing if you didn’t grow up with incredible standards for food, but otherwise she’ll eat nearly anything.
In my parents’ relationship, my dad lives in the kitchen and my mom has the special recipes: carrot cake, pancakes, lemon bars. When we were kids, she cooked this veggie chili that would somehow feed my monstrously hungry brothers for at least a week.
About once a year, I recreate the chili. It’s an enormous stewed pot of beans, tomatoes, vegetables, and spices. Half of the pot will feed me for days, and the other half goes into the freezer for whenever cooking feels like a torturous chore.
I’d originally planned to simply write up this recipe for today’s newsletter, something I’ve been wanting to do since I wrote about the versatility and magic of canned beans. The text would end here, and you’d get your recipe, and that would be all for a week where I’ve been too preoccupied watching friends and peers get laid off from newspapers across the country, while I work ridiculously hard on some of the most exciting and simultaneously lowest-paying stories of my career.
But then the world intervened. I cooked the chili for friend of the newsletter Emily this week, and Emily had a lot of questions.
Emily had recently tried to make her own veg chili, and it just didn’t go well. (Hi Emily!) Troubleshooting the bitter and disappointing dish brought her to one of the NYT cooking guides, which are gorgeous interactive encyclopedia entries on whatever you’re cooking: “Who knew that there’s a whole world of chili. They told me you need to find what chili works for you,” she said.
No shade to the NYT, but if you’re just trying to make a delicious chili, you don’t need an existential reflection. You need your cooking instincts.
I don’t write recipes for a living, but I imagine that chili recipes must be very frustrating to create. Recipes generally have a problem where the quality of the ingredients will shape the outcome in an uncontrollable way. Chili has so many ingredients of such varying quality that the problem is magnified: Carrots and bell peppers can be sugary or mildly sweet, chili powder and cayenne punchy and hot or mild and unassertive, jalapeños spicy or unobtrusive. Canned beans and tomatoes not only vary in quality and flavor, but their oft-substantive salt content is unknowable and unpredictable.
With all of these variables, you’re more likely to get a consistent product if you trust your instincts, referring instead to a recipe as a basic template. Cooking chili is about paying attention, tasting frequently as you go, knowing what you’re tasting, and knowing how to adapt. (This is the main thing that FoodTok can’t teach you, because the creators are making gorgeous food so that you’ll keep watching and fantasizing about the cook you could be in your dreams, not teaching you how the food should taste so that you’ll become a better cook in reality.)
So today, I’ve written a recipe for my mom’s chili that’s really a cooking exercise.
This is a much longer newsletter than usual, and I’m putting the recipe here instead of at the end. After the recipe, I’ve written out my thoughts on how to test and strengthen your cooking instincts as you make the chili. It’s basically an extra newsletter, written based on questions Emily asked me when we tried to troubleshoot the problems with her chili. If that’s not for you, just follow the recipe as best you can, although you’ll notice I’ve deliberately been quite vague about some of the ingredient amounts and steps.
Bean and Vegetable Chili
Makes so much chili. About 4 quarts, depending on how much veg you use.
Cooking time: About three hours, mostly unsupervised time on the stove.
Ingredients
2 onions, roughly diced
2 bell peppers, roughly diced
2 carrots, peeled and and roughly chopped into 1/2 inch coins
4-6 cloves of garlic, minced
1-2 jalapenos, minced (seeded if you want mild, unseeded if you’re going for spicy)
Chili powder, paprika, cayenne, cumin: Quantities vary depending on the strength of your spices and what flavor you like. I’d use at least a tablespoon of chili powder and a teaspoon of paprika and cayenne, but adjust to your preferences. I’ve never actually measured these spices, instead blooming them in the pot and then tasting. You could use whole dried peppers here (smoked ancho, chile de arbol, etc), just remember to fish them out before serving.
A few tablespoons of tomato paste (optional)
2 cans of black beans, drained and rinsed
2 cans of kidney beans, drained and rinsed
2 28-ounce cans of diced tomatoes
2-4 cups of water
Salt, to taste
Olive oil, for cooking
A box of mushrooms, sliced (optional)
Other vegetables: 1/4 head of shredded cabbage, a few handfuls of spinach, other shredded greens (optional)
Make it meaty: Shredded chicken or pork, already cooked (optional)
Instructions
In a large Dutch oven or a large pasta pot, heat a few glugs of olive oil and saute the onions over medium heat with a bit of salt, until softened.
Add bell peppers, carrots, and a bit of salt, continuing to saute until the onions are beginning to caramelize and the peppers and carrots are softening.
Make some space in middle of the pot, put a little more oil to heat in the bottom of the pan, turn up the heat to high, and then add aromatics and spices — garlic, jalapeno, spices, and optional tomato paste. Toss around in the central area until everything starts to toast and sizzle, 10-20 seconds. Then mix it all in with the rest of the vegetables and turn the heat back to medium.
Add all of the beans, tomatoes, water, and more salt to the pot, stir, bring to a boil, and taste. Adjust spices and salt if needed. The amount of water you need really depends on how liquidy everything else is; make sure there’s enough water to cover everything but not too much more than that.
Simmer for about 2.5 hours if you can. Taste and adjust salt and spices from time to time. Stir occasionally to make sure nothing’s stuck to the bottom. Add water if the chili starts to dry out.
About 30 minutes before finishing, add mushrooms or other veg. Adjust seasonings again if necessary. Add a little butter if you want it creamy, or a bit of brown sugar if it’s still just not getting sweet.
Remove from heat when mushrooms are cooked to your liking.
Top each bowl of chili with sour cream or cheese, slices of avocado if you like, or cilantro. Serve over brown rice if you’re looking for a fuller meal with more texture, or alongside cornbread. (I like this recipe a lot.)
Keep some leftover chili in the fridge for up to a week; freeze the rest.
Testing your cooking instincts
More than anything else, the process starts with salt. My mom understands, better than anyone else I know, the power of salt to make something taste richer, stronger, and more complex. “This needs salt” is a phrase I heard at the dinner table once a week as a kid. I’ve known since before I was a conscious person that bland food, food that tastes wrong or off, and food that’s unexciting has not been salted properly. I learned very early on that you salt every step of the way: for every new ingredient in the pan, add salt to go along with it.
“Salt to taste” might be an irritating command for an inexperienced cook, but it’s a useful one. Each brand of salt has crystals of different sizes, making measurements useless if you aren’t sure whether the recipe calls for Diamond Crystal Kosher or Morton Kosher or fine sea salt (Morton Kosher is twice as salty as Diamond Crystal if you have a tablespoon of each).
You need to pick one type of salt and stick to it for everything (kosher is the most all-purpose). Use salt from beginning to end when you cook. Know that when you “taste” for salt, you’re tasting for something that is not actually saltiness.
To put this into practice with the chili: You put the onions in the pan with a sprinkling of salt. Then you add the peppers and carrots, with a sprinkling of salt. Then you add the spices and the garlic and the jalapeno, with a sprinkling of salt. Then you add the tomatoes and the water and the beans, with more salt. Each time you add anything new, you taste what’s in the pot. Do the onions feel sweet and savory? Do the peppers and carrots have more flavor than they did when they were raw? Do the spices really punch you in the mouth?
Think of salt as an emphasizer. The more you taste, the more you’ll recognize how salt changes the flavor of each ingredient. Be patient. Salt will not magically enter into the depths of each vegetable in the few seconds between when you season and taste; notice what something tastes like right before you salt it, right after, and a few minutes later. Don’t scoop the salt with a spoon or pile it into your hand. If you always season with pinches between your fingers, your subconscious lizard brain will start to develop an instinct for how much salt you need.
For people afraid of over-salting without measurements, a big batch of chili is a great way to experiment. If you salt your onions and peppers and carrots and then taste to discover that they’re noticeably salty, no big deal. You’re going to add so much bean and tomato that you’ll need all of that salt later.
Embrace longer cooking times: An all-veg chili doesn’t have any rich fat to soften, meaning that it’s pretty easy to end up with a final product that tastes very sour or very bitter. But longer cooking times and a high ratio of sweet vegetables will prevent this.
Carrots, bell peppers (especially the orange, yellow, and red ones), and onions all become very sugary the longer they’re cooked. In my experience, I get a sweeter chili if I caramelize the onions a bit before adding the other vegetables and then cook down the carrots and bell peppers before adding the tomato.
Ensure that you have at least a couple of hours to cook after adding the beans and tomatoes. The tomatoes will sweeten and become less acidic the longer that they cook, the other vegetables will continue to caramelize, and many of the compounds that make bitter flavors will break down over time.
Longer cooking times increase the chances that your chili will become an indescribable mush, but there are a few ways around that. Save vegetables that really don’t need long to cook until about thirty minutes before you’re done, adding them in for texture; chopped mushrooms are my favorite, shredded cabbage would also be nice. Though it’s not very traditional, I find this chili to make a fuller meal served over brown rice, which adds textural difference for anyone frustrated by mushiness.
Know your spices and bloom them: Indian home cooks know this technique so much better than the rest of us. Spices and aromatics (garlic, shallots, etc) develop much more flavor if they’re allowed to toast in hot oil for a few seconds. When you add the garlic, jalapeños, chili powder, and other spices, clear a space in the pan, pour a little bit of oil and let it heat up, and then toss the spices in the oil for ten seconds or so until they sizzle and smell a little bit, then mix them in with the vegetables.
If you’re not sure what chili powder, paprika, cayenne, and cumin taste like individually, try them. Put a little bit on your finger and lick it before you add it to the pan: This will give you a sense of what to look for once you’re tasting and adjusting. Missing heat? Maybe you need some cayenne. Looking for warmth? Paprika could do it. Doesn’t taste like chili? More chili powder.
You can adjust the spice amounts at any point while you’re cooking, but it will be a lot easier to adjust them later if you’ve bloomed some of them early on in the cooking and you know what flavors you’re seeking.
If you’ve made it all the way to the end here, thank you for reading. You’re the audience I’m writing for, so please feel free to respond to this email with any questions if you need help troubleshooting your chili. I’ll be back with a more normal-sized newsletter soon.