Food: Epic Chili Dinner

As a challenge for myself, I sometimes like to host large dinner parties where I am responsible for cooking almost all the food for the night. The latest dinner was my biggest yet. Normally I had been cooking for 15-20 guests, which was a challenge in itself in my old place with a single oven and limited counter space. What was on the menu?

Chili.

Usually, I will cook for about 12-15 people, but after getting an estimated guest list of 40+ people, I realized I had a daunting task ahead of me. first off, I estimated the necessary amounts of food I would need to buy. so where am I going to go to get lots of cheap food? the local korean store and a costco of course! it was great day at the local Lotte and Costco, I came home with this:

These were the raw ingredients needed to make the chili, a half-sheet of bacon corn bread, a half-sheet of spicy corn bread, pasta for the cincinnati-style fans, and 40 ramekins of various-size creme brulees.

For protein, I had the following:
~18 lbs of lean ground chuck
~ 4 lbs hot italian sausage
~ 4 lbs chicken andouille sausage
~ 4 lbs bacon (drained)

So the big problem came of “how to brown all this meat?”. The solution? divide and conquer. I pulled out my two 10″ Lodge Cast Iron Skillets and started cooking in batches. After each batch was finished cooking, I put the meat in the pot beside it and kept on cooking!

After all the meat was cooked, now it was a matter of combining all the ingredients together to make the soup. There was a considerable amount of dicing and chopping involved:

~ 60 stalks celery
~ 8.5 lbs onions
~ 12 bell peppers
~ 20 carrots

So how did I keep chopping and cutting without my hand feeling like it was going to fall off? thankfully I chose to use my Kycoera Ceramic knife to do all the work for me. If you haven’t use a ceramic knife yet, pick one up next time you’re at Williams Sonoma or Sur La Table, you’ll notice immediately that the ceramic knives are way lighter than their metal counterparts. Even the light Global Knife line does get as light as ceramic. The weight is one of the distinct advantages to owning a ceramic knife, the second is that the blade should never need to be sharpened under normal use. Ceramic is a much harder material than the high-carbon steel used in traditional knives and will hold its factory edge for the life of the knife. With the advantages, however, come the disadvantages, which prevent a ceramic knife from being my go-to knife. Ceramic knives are brittle and may break if dropped onto a hard surface or if a “plant and twist” motion is put on it. This prevents the knife from being used to manipulate bone-in meat. I pretty much use this knife on veggies because it slices through everything perfectly every time. For a big cutting project like the chili mise en place, my kyocera let me cut without fatigue.

After combining all the ingredients, all that was left was to let it simmer out and let all the flavors combine. I tend to like a super savory smoky chili, the smoke comes from two places: chipotle peppers and liquid smoke. yes. I cheat and use liquid smoke

The result: delicious chili and fixin’s for way more than 40 people (about 25 quarts) and dessert for everyone! I’ll have a future post on the 40 creme brulees with recipe.

I’m working on the time-lapse video I took during the party, that’ll hopefully be up soon.