Lieutenant Tom Papoutsis of Fairfax County Fire and Rescue back. We’re making Firehouse Chili.
We’re going to start out at this point, we’re going to saut? our vegetables and we’re also going to start browning our meat. To saut? our vegetables, which we’re going to start first, we’re going to start out on a high heat. I’m using a well seasoned—this is a very well seasoned cast-iron skillet. You can use a saut? pan, but once you get one of these cast-iron skillets seasoned real well, nothing really sticks to it, so it’s a pretty big size and that’s what we use in the firehouse.
So we’re going to start out, a little bit of olive oil. We’ll put just a couple tablespoons of olive oil in there. Let that heat up a little bit, will be good to go, and we have our onions and green peppers, we’re going to add in our onions and Green Peppers, and we’re going to start softening these., we want these. You could see there’s a lot, because we’re making a big batch of chili. This is going to feed about twelve to fourteen hungry firefighters. So these guys when they eat, they eat pretty good but they’re going to have some leftovers so we’re going to have quite a quantity here that we’re going to deal with. So you can hear that starting to move for us. Get rid of this, very good.
The other thing we’re going to add in at this point, we’re going to go ahead and put our garlic in with it as well. So this is the three Bell Peppers and actually we used two onions in this. I kept one onion back I had three, we kept one back for garnish at the end. We’ll show you what that’s all about.
This is about five or six, good sized cloves of garlic. We got our garlic going and at this point, I am going to get things moving. You can see these things are starting to soften up on the bottom already, that’s what we want; we want to get this stuff to the point where the onions get nice and translucent. That will make them real good, softens them up so they cook a little bit faster, a little bit better in our chili.
Now, we are going to add some salt. Typically, I don’t measure anything, my thing is, it’s kitchen chemistry, we don’t have to be, it’s not an exact science try to get it as close as you can. If you want to, you use your hand, you’ve got about, oh, I’d say a little bit better than a tablespoon, tablespoon-and-a-half. I will put that in and then I kind of gauge it, I look at it and its like, yeah, okay, that’s enough right there.
It’s all to taste, after you get to doing it for a while, you kind of get a feel as to how much you use, but if you want to learn, some of the best cooks do not measure anything, they know their spices. I like to tell people go through your spice cabinet and get used to what they are, open them up, smell them, and if it’s a strong spice its going to give strong flavor, if it’s a mild spice so stronger use less, mild you use more. So, we are going to look that work a little bit, we are going to bring in our pepper. Again, I am just going to sprinkle it overtop, you can see that I am not using a whole lot, but I am getting a good coverage overtop, that’s probably good about right there.
So you can see how it’s not like as big pile of pepper, it’s a little bit of pepper spread out over an area, but we probably have maybe a teaspoon to two teaspoons of pepper in there, and we’re going to start moving this around. Okay, so we are going to saut? this, get this working. You can see that’s starting to work real nice for us, we are going to let that go. At this point, I am going to start on the meat; we are going to go ahead, we’re going to turn our burner up. I am going to start this at high heat as well. We’re going to use a little bit of our olive oil. I am just using extra virgin olive oil. Personally, I prefer the extra virgin, because I like the flavor. It’s got that full body flavor of the olive and I really like it. So we’re going to go ahead and add our meat in. Now remember this is a big batch, this is like nine pounds of meat right here. So we’re going to go ahead and get that started and drop it in there. Since we get all this meat in, come on, there we go. There we go, we’ll get that started. You can see, you are probably wondering why is this guy is using a spatula and not a spoon. A lot of times, I like using spatula to do stuff like this because it—actually I can scrape the bottom better, if there was anything sticking I could kind of move it around, so that works good. In here, we’re probably going to go ahead and use a spoon, I need to get a hot pad, and I am going to turn this around. I got to watch myself, and we are going to start moving this around in here because its start browning, it’s going to start browning up pretty quick. The other thing I want to do is I’m going to start that out on high, but we’re going to end up moving that to a medium high heat so that we don’t burn it. The onions and green peppers and garlic are saut?ing up very nicely. You can see how they are starting to be translucent. So we’re going to let these go for a couple of minutes, and we’re going to start working this meat browning it up, get it good and brown, get this done, and then we’re going to come back and we’re going to start adding our spices in.
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