Rifles and Recipes Charlie's Wild Game Chili
 | Author:
Eileen Clarke
Author: Rifles and Recipes |
Makes 2 quarts/8 cups
Our friend and rifle maker Charlie Sisk gave me this recipe to try. Mostly. Since Charlie always has bacon grease in the house, he just used bacon grease to fry the veggies and meat. I don’t use bacon as often (yes I love it, it doesn’t love me) so I just chopped up bacon and used that to start the chili. Charlie also loves spicy, so his original recipe called for a ‘big dose of black pepper’ and ‘½ a handful’ of cilantro. That ½ handful was about 1 cup and, when chopped, yielded about ¼ cup. (FYI: that’s a common ratio. One cup of unchopped leaves, whatever they are, yields ¼ cup finely chopped.) We’ve made Charlie’s chili with every big game animal, including bear. But we do measure the black pepper.
Browning equals better flavor. I own three skillets that each have a 10” browning surface and, while my 5-quart Lodge Dutch oven’s browning surface is only 1” smaller, it has straight, 5” high sides. Straight sides, especially 5” tall, trap moisture; moisture escapes from the meat as you brown, but can’t escape the pot. Instead of caramelizing the meat, enriching and sweetening it, that moisture becomes ugly gray-brown bubbles that water down the flavor. Browning in a skillet and transferring to the Dutch oven works better.
A 10” skillet, a tablespoon of oil, medium heat and 6-8 ounces of meat--about 1 cup--will brown properly. (It always helps to wrap the meat in a couple of layers of paper towels, and give it a gentle squeeze.) When the oil is hot, add that cup of meat to the pan and spread it out. No steam? Make the next batch a little bigger. As soon as you get ugly gray liquid boiling up, back down the size of the batch. That’s your batch size for that size pan.
Ingredients
½ pound bacon, in all, chopped
2 pounds ground venison
1 big red onion, chopped small
1 green bell (sweet) pepper, chopped small
1 bag (1¼ ounce) McCormick Taco seasoning mix (30% less salt)
2 cans original flavor Rotel (10 ounces each)
¼ cup finely chopped fresh cilantro
¼ cup chopped jalapeño peppers
1 teaspoon black pepper
8 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
Cooking
1. Heat a large skillet over medium heat, and cook half the bacon. When the bacon starts getting brown, add the ground venison in batches, of about 6-8 ounces at a time, and cook it until no pink is left, about 4-5 minutes. Transfer to a Dutch oven (DO). Put the rest of the bacon in the pan and let it get nicely brown. Add the onion and sweet green pepper to the bacon and fry until the veggies are slightly browned, another 4-5 minutes.
2. Add all that to the Dutch oven, then add the McCormick Taco seasoning, Rotel, cilantro, jalapeño pepper and black pepper. Give the pot a good stir, then break up the cream cheese into 1-inch squares, and add to the chili. With a spatula, break up the cream cheese some more and stir it into the chili, until it all melts evenly into the sauce.
3. Serve hot, with corn muffins or corn chips and ice cold cerveza.
Eileen Clarke was game care and recipe columnist for Field & Stream and Successful Hunter magazines, and has written a dozen wild game cookbooks. This recipe is from The Wild Bowl: 100 soups, stews and chilies. To order: https://www.riflesandrecipes.com/406-521-0273. She lives in Townsend.
Eileen Clarke
https://www.riflesandrecipes.com
406-521-0273
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