Lieutenant Tom Papoutsis back. We’re cooking Firehouse Chili in McLean, Virginia at Fire Station 1 Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department.
At this point, as you can see we have our onions are nice and clear. We’ve actually softened up those green peppers, the garlic in there, salt and pepper. Things have kind of—the flavors have kind of started to all melt in this pan. We have our ground beef is nice and brown at this point. We’re going to kind of give this good stir and we’re going to start and incorporating things here. This is where are chili starts to come together. What we’re going to do, we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to take our green peppers and onions and garlic. And we’re going to go ahead and we’re going just dump that right in there. So all of these is going into this chili, there we go, looking good. I like using my spatula, spatula works really well, these are big heavy pans too so I’m kind of letting that rest on there, so it’s working really well, there we go.
We’ve got that in. We’re going to stir this around. Were going to mix together all of this onion, green pepper, garlic and ground beef. And we got that started. We’ve cut the heat back to about a medium high at this point. We don’t want it too hot because we’ve already browned the meat. We don’t want things starting to burn. Now, we’re going to start introducing our spices. Biggest things we’re going to start with this point, chili powder. Again, what we’re going to do, we’re going to add our chili powder, and it’s going to take quite a bit a chili powder because you want this to actually have a nice red color if we’re making our Firehouse Chili of course. If we’re making green chili we don’t want to use too much of this, but we’re going to start out with that. We probably have a good at least four table spoons, three to four tablespoons in there. I'm going to go ahead and incorporate that, mix that around. And the smells are starting to come together. I wish you could be here to smell this, because this is where the chili really starts to take form. Okay so we got that working there. You can see things are starting to come together. We got our onion, green peppers, garlic and we just put the chili powder in there. It’s starting to take a little bit of color. We’re going to go ahead and put this back on and we’re going to add some paprika. Next spice is going to be paprika, I’m actually just going to take the lid off of this and we’re going to go probably a good another three to four, two to three, three to four tablespoons. I kind of go by smell, I like to use a lot of my olfactory senses because that’s what kind of tells me what’s going on and what I’m making. So we’re going to mix that in, you could see we add that in, we start to get more of the color coming into it. Starts to get a nice, reddish brown color and it’s starting to take shape, okay here we go.
Next spice we’re going to add, we’re going to go with the Cumin. Cumin is the heart of the chili. You smell that cumin and that is what gives chili its flavor. You’ve got to have cumin, if you’re going to make good chili, so we’re going to put probably about, two, I’d say one and a half to two tablespoons in there. This is a full jar and I’m probably going to use half a jar and then I’ll check it and we’ll see what will come from there as to whether it needs more or not. So as you can see, there’s our cumin we laid in there and now we’re going to incorporate that and mix that in. Mix it around, okay, looking good. The smell is starting to get, that’s chili, it’s starting to turn into chili right now. So we’re going to let this sit.
Next step, I’m going to kick the heat up just a little bit it’s not quite bubbling the way I want. Now, we’re going to add our tomatoes. Very simple, take our tomatoes, in they go. We’re going to mix those around. As you can hear, we’re in the Firehouse, things are a little busy, we’ve got the phone ringing, we got things going on. Units are out, running calls. I’m in here cooking for these guys. They’re going to love this tonight.
So as you can see, we’re going to mix these around, get all these tomatoes incorporated. These things are going to disappear, what’s going to happen, we’re going to cook this and it’s just going to just disappear in there. Okay so there’s where we’re at right now. Now, me personally, I like to give it a smell. It’s smelling pretty good but I can tell it needs a little bit more of chili powder and a little bit more cumin. And when we come back, we’re going to check it in again. We’re going to let it bubble up a little bit here. We’ll check it again and then we’re going to add some other things when we come back.
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