>>2284489Texans are weird, beef in chili is just as divergent, if not more divergent, than beans. Chili CON carne means Chili with meat, chili in it's base state doesn't have meat. Chili should principally be made with peppers, but if you're adding beef, you need acid to balance the meal and when Texans surrender themselves to weird purity memes about poor people food for migrant hands from 200 years ago, and use white fucking vinegar to balance their chili con carne instead of tomatoes, it makes my head hurt. Vinegar is a condiment, tomatoes are food. Use food!
FWIW, my Abuela's Chili was 3 parts ancho to 2 parts hatch to one part chimayo, to one part guajilo, for the chilies, with 1 part onion, a clove of garlic, a sprig of paprika, a sprig of oregano, a couple of bay leaves, with salt, tumeric, cumin, cocoa, and black pepper, as powders, and beans for most of the protein. Sometimes she'd halve the beans and add beef, generally a cheap roast she'd stew with tomatoes and more chimayos, and shred. The tomatoes would always be blanched before being stewed with the beef, so the skins would peel off easy, and the hatch and ancho chilies would be roasted until their skins could be peeled. Every time I make it, I use beef and tomatoes.
For my graduation, she did a batch where each portion was 10 lbs in a 35 gallon drum. My mom had to help her roast and skin the chilies and it was over a year before she made chili again for my dad because she was so tired of seeing them by the time they got to the bottom of a 50 lb pile of ancho and hatch chilies.
The leftovers didn't last a week, so good.
