This young lady is a hunter, and if you kill and clean your deer you can cook it however you want. She’s also from Tennessee, as her accent plainly displays, so I knew there’d be beans in her chili.
Brown sugar, though? That’s a new one for me. I don’t think I’ll be adding any sugar to my chili.
9 comments:
Sometimes the addition of sugar in small amounts can "thicken" (for lack of a better vocabulary) the flavor of soups, etc. Seems to pull out the flavors and reduce acidity. I am no cook, but have watched my wife do this with noticeable improvement on a few dishes.
Your chili, though- I am quite sure it needs no improvement. Just adding this comment because there may be a few other yankee's like me struggling mightily to put down the salt cod and potato's....
Side note- I married an Italian- the first Christmas I went to to meet the family there was a 25' long table, a crowd of folks, and not one single thing on the menu I could identify! La Vigilia- feast of the seven fishes.
Give the brown sugar a try. The dish will no longer be chili, but it'll still be very delicious.
Eric Hines
Sugars/sweeteners are often used to tame down too much heat in a dish, and while I prefer honey, I can see where the molasses in the brown sugar would add a rich undertone to the chilis.
Theoretically anything with tomatoes in it can have sugar, since there's a wide variety of sweetness in tomatoes. Some people (not I) add sugar to Italian tomato sauces.
It's also true that some Mexican dishes, in certain regions particularly, include a number of ingredients we tend to associate with Christmastime: I've seen moles and chilis that feature ingredients like toasted pumpkin seeds or cinnamon (and famously chocolate). If you added a touch of brown sugar to that, you'd get something somewhere between a smoky, earthy chili and a pumpkin pie.
It might be good, or it might be horrible. It would certainly not fit the flavor profile either of our usual chilis nor our usual Christmas desserts.
"... you'd get something somewhere between a smoky, earthy chili and a pumpkin pie."
Now that might make pumpkin pie taste good for a change. 0>;~}
I don't object to sweetness in stews on principle. We make a wonderful Mexican stew with pineapple, raisins, and plaintains, along with pork, green olives, tomatoes, onions, and jalapenos.
It’s not that I have a principle against it. I just grew up in Appalachia, where sugar was very expensive (being effectively an import), and thus not a regular feature of the cuisine. There’s a similar thing with cornbread. Down to the coast, where sugar grows, cornbread usually has sugar in it. Where I come from it never does. It’s a big divide between lowland and highland Southern culture, I think.
I'd presume (especially from the name!) that was Christmas Eve. It made it much easier for my wife and I that her family celebrated with a Christmas Eve feast with fish (European tradition- in her case Hungarian), and mine in the traditional Christmas Day dinner. Thanksgiving is when we get out the full 16 foot table (if needed), because everyone from both sides that can comes to our house.
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