Hi, I'm Scott Samuel here at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in Napa Valley.
Today I'm going to show you how to make a vegetarian chili. It's one of my favorite chilis.
It's incorporating black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, and a variety of vegetables.
And it's very simple to make, very tasty, and goes great with cornbread.
So, let's take a look at the ingredients.
We are going to use "onion family" of onion and garlic. We're going to use a serrano pepper and red pepper - that's going to be the beginning. So let's get going with that.
So, I'm turning my pot on about medium-high heat. I want to get some nice color here.
and extract a lot of the moisture, and basically kill the raw flavor of all of these vegetables, here.
So, onions, garlic, and serrano pepper (that's chopped)
.....and some red pepper (that's chopped).
All right, so we'll cook that for about - I don't know - five or eight minutes, just get a bit of color.
Once this has some color, and the base of it, we are going to add our corn and our zucchini.
And then we're to add our beans. And I have black beans, kidney beans, and pinto beans,
some tomato purée, and I've made a roasted red pepper purée.
So, you can either roast your own peppers like this, which I've done over a flame,
and then we can proceed to just wipe the skin off of it.
This is a method we do for roasted red pepper.
And then we could chop, it or purée it in a blender. This is adding some body and some depth to the chili.
I'm choosing to use canned beans today because they're a lot easier to work with in terms of versatility in the high school environment.
But we could also do the dry bean method of cooking.
So, one thing I wanted to show you about when we're doing our peppers
is that we're going to be dicing peppers...... we want to take these ribs out......
because of their flavor. They don't have much flavor.
And then just a simple dice on the red pepper. I do the skin-side down.
[light chopping sounds]
I'll just add this to our chili base.
And I like to add a pinch of salt in the beginning of adding the vegetables, so it draws out the moisture,
and it actually helps with the evaporation of the moisture and caramelization of the vegetable.
All right, this is what it should look like. The vegetables are releasing a lot of their moisture.
Sizzling here, getting some nice color.
I'm going to go ahead and add my zucchini......
and my corn.....
And if you have fresh corn and corn on the cob....
it's easy to do or you can use a frozen kernels.
But if I'm doing corn on the cob, I'm going to take the kernels off the cob, with the cob on the board.
All right, we'll cook this down for about five minutes.
A little bit more color with the vegetables we've just added.
First thing we're going to use will be chili powder.
I have some cumin......
some ground coriander.....
some cayenne, for just a little bit of heat......
some garlic powder......
....and then, the secret ingredient here is a little bit of cocoa.
So, about a teaspoon of dried cocoa, kind of live-ins it up, enriches it.
You know, we don't have any meat in here, so the cocoa actually adds a little sense of umami to it, which would be actually coming from the bean.
Let's add all of our spices.
All right, now I'm going to add the three different types of beans
that I've actually just drained and rinsed, so that I actually rinse off some of the sodium.
Kidney beans, pinto beans, and black beans.
And I'm adding a tomato purée..... just a tomato purée out of the can.....
I'm adding a few cups of vegetable stock.
And I spoke earlier of the roasted red pepper purée.
So, roasted red pepper is puréed in a blender. This is going to add some depth and a little bit of texture to our soup.
So, our chile's had a chance to cook down for about 30-40 minutes, and it smells great.
It looks great, and it's thickened up a little bit.
So I think it's ready to serve.
The last thing I want to do, at the very last second, will be to add some chopped cilantro.
And you see I have some stems here, that's fine, the stems have a lot of flavor.
But this is going to give it a last-second punch of bright fresh flavor.
So, chopped cilantro.....
and a little pinch of pepper......
All right, so this is great. It can be done ahead of time to this point, and cooled
and served within a couple days.
It's vegetarian, completely.
It's also gluten free.
There we go. Our vegetarian chili with black beans, pinto beans, and kidney beans.
Enjoy!
you