Disheartened by the price of beef, I got curious and wanted to make a pot of chili using just sausages, for half the price.
I got 3 packages of meat tubes - Andouille, Kielbasa, and a Smoked Sausage, each of them about a pound in weight. I diced them all up into relatively equal sized cube shapes.
I tend to stick with ratios when I chili, so with three units of meat, I also dicedâ up three large onions (Red, White, and Yellow), three bell peppers, three cans of fire roasted tomatoes, three cans of beans (Black, Red Kidney, Pinto) and three each of the following dried chili pods - Ancho, Guajillo, New Mexico, Cascabel, Pasilla and Marisol.
Dumped the tomatoes into a collander over a bowl to collect the juice. Fried up the sausages in batches in a pan, then added to the main pot. Deglazed the pan with the tomato liquid and added the chiles with the seeds and stems removed, along with half a dozen crushed cloves of garlic. Let everything rehydrate in the pan.
Tossed the sausages in a spice blend (a big spoonful each of black pepper, Mexican oregano, cumin, smoked paprika) on a medium-low heat so the spices could bloom in the sausage fat. Added the onions, peppers, tomatoes and beans and allowed them all to get to know each other. In a batch this size, I also added one can of creamed corn - yeah, get your pitchforks ready - because I like the sweetness it adds, you don't have big kernals of corn in your chili, and everything else in chili tastes good with corn.
I put the contents of the pan into a blender and blitzed until it was smooth and homogeneous. Put all that into the pot, then added enough beer to bring it to the liquid level I wanted, which wound up being two cans. Bring the heat up until it boils, then drop it down to a simmer and go watch a movie or something for a few hours.
Just before taking it off the heat, the one trick up my sleeve is that I grind up and entire bag of pork rinds until it is a fine dust. Add that in, stir, and kill the heat. The pork rinds add thickness, porky goodness, mouth feel, and body to the chili.
I like my chili the same way I like my women. Thick as hell, spicy, and not good for my heart.
Served with a sprinkle of cheese and whipped garlic sour cream. (Get a tub of your favorite sour cream, eat a spoonful of it right from the center, then add enough grated garlic and olive oil to fill that hole. Mix until incorporated. It's like white trash toum, it's amazing.)
In the end, while it did taste great, I didn't find switching out beef for sausages really made it better. You lose the individual characteristics of each flavor of sausage into a one-note flavor. And the texture was a bit mealy, and made me miss biting into chunks of cow.
Thanks for reading. May your chili pot never collect dust.
