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recovering from cooking mistakes: too much chili
A coupe of Sundays ago Melanie was making our smoky beer chili con carne recipe and instead of grabbing the Tex-Mex chili powder, accidentally grabbed the Indian powdered chilli (note the two Ls). The difference was distinctly hotter. Tex-Mex chili powder doesn’t just add heat, but also flavor. Indian chilli is like adding straight cayenne, but hotter.
So what do we do? We didn’t want to toss out the whole thing and start over. That would have been a waste of the ingredients already in the pot. So I went looking online for ways to mitigate the effects of too much hot pepper.
What I found were several tips for reducing the heat of over-spiced Indian dishes, but the ideas were transferable.
One person suggested that dairy would counteract some of the effects of hot pepper. Sour cream seemed an obvious choice, except we didn’t have any on hand and it was too late on this particular Sunday to get it at the grocery store. Yogurt was also suggested because it also has some acid as well, which was also suggested as a cure for too much heat. Obviously, unless you want to introduce a new flavor to the party, you want to use plain yogurt. We also elected to add this at the end, in the individual bowls.
Another site suggested the use of tomatoes to cut the heat. Again, this was a matter of acid counteracting the heat in the pepper. In the case of the chili we added both tomato sauce and diced tomatoes. This helped a little. More beans was another suggestion.
Yet other advice suggested the addition of sugar. I didn’t want to turn the chili into dessert so we didn’t want to add too much here. I though the introduction of a little natural fructose in the form of a grated carrot or too would be good. This would add some natural simple sugars without altering the flavor too much.
In the end, all of these steps cut the heat .... a little. The chili was edible, but only just so for us. We (or at least I) have stomachs of iron, and even I could only have one bowl before it became too much.
Perhaps the most effective solution would have been to take half the tainted, too-hot chili and freeze then build up the remaining half using un-spiced ingredients.
So what other cooking mistakes have you made and what steps did you take the fixed or at least corrected the error somewhat? Please share them in the comments.
COMMENTS
Ha! I was making pancakes from scratch using my wife’s great recipe. Added x-number of tablespoons of salt, instead of teaspoons. Oops. Just told the kids to pour on more syrup.
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on 12/24/06 at 12:10 PMCommenting is not available in this weblog entry.
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