Ever since I heard of a ‘friend of a friend’ who smoked his ground meats for chili, I wanted to make ‘over the top’ chili, which is, as it sounds, smoking the ground meat ‘loaf’ ‘over the top’ of the chili base so not only does the meat and the chili base smoke, the drippings enhance the base below. WOW it is worth the effort.
Base it on your favorite chili recipe, and I did the following with my favorite (NY Times Cooking) recipe: 3lb ground meat (1lb pork, 2lb beef) tbsp or so Worcestershire sauce, S&P, bit of bbq rub, mix into a very loose loaf. Make most of your chili base, whatever you want (no beans yet, or cocoa powder if you use it) and place the meat loaf on a rack over the base. Smoke at 250 for 3 hours, until the meat is around 150 degrees, crumble the meat up, finish ingredients as you prefer, simmer.
It has a wonderful smoky flavor, highly recommended.
PIcs are as follows: 1) just put on smoker, 2) one hour in, 3) two hours in, 4) 3 (and change) hours in (and if you look closely at 2nd photo, you can see the drippings on the surface of the chili base. I did stir the base a couple times to expose more of the liquid to the smoke)
I’ve done this a few times and enjoyed the outcome. I’ve never used pork in my mix though but a few slices of bacon chopped up after smoking it. I might have to give this another shot with the pork mixed in to the beef.
When you refer to the chili base, I assume that’s onion, garlic, tomato, chilis, spices, etc. Was that all thrown into the pot raw and cooked a bit by the 3 hours on smoke? Did you then take that pan, now with delicious drippings, and sauté / sweat the mixture?
Yeah, for me it was everything but the beans, beer, and cocoa powder (as that comes toward the end). Sauteed the veggies, added the tomato base and spices, put the loaf on top for the 3 hours, stirred a few times expose more of the base to the smoke and blend in the drippings
Here we go!
Hear me out-I used half wagyu and half grass fed so I want to regulate how much fat goes into the final product. I’m gonna see how much renders in the initial phase of cooking/smoking-add what I think is proper to the chili base then put it under my ‘ball’
Hey @ToddFrench after the meat was done did you ‘crumble’ it up and put it in the chili base then continue to smoke the whole pot meat included? If so how long was your total cook time approximately?
Thanks
Remember I did my meat over the chili (tomato) soup base, and from the looks of it, I left mine much more on the rare side (I recall it at about 120 degrees maybe, as I knew it would finish cooking in the chili over a few more hours. I crumbled it almost immediately thereafter because I used my bbq gloves, the same ones I use to shred pork shoulder. Yours has so much in the way of drippings, wow! And the finished produce is a less-tomatoey version than mine was - how was it?? What are the tweaks you will do?
I’ve tried this a couple of times, but prefer the browned/caramelization flavor from searing off in beef tallow (and using a one pot approach for max flavor) to the marginal smoke flavor you get using a pellet smoker.
Regardless of method, use ancho chili powder… and 3x what you think you need!
