Roman’s Amazing Vegan Chilli

If you serve this with wraps, guacamole, salsa and some nice grated cheese: it’s one of those dishes where the family are sat opposite, interacting with each other and the food, passing dishes, making up wraps, children helping their younger siblings.

It breaks down barriers and good conversation and mirth are all but inevitable. A good thing in these trying and clasutrophobic times. I dare you to finish this meal with a board game with people. Imagine enjoying each others company!

Gear

• 1 chopping board
• Sharp Knife
• Large saucepan

Vegan Chilli

Ingredients

• Garlic  
• Ginger 
• Onion  
• Chillis – ideally a range of them. If you want to go as authentic and tasty as possible, you pick some for strength (habanero or maybe some birds eye will do) some for fruityness and flavour (Poblanos – ancho when dried – and cascabel) and of course, chipotle for that smokiness (chipotlaway for the aftereffects if needed)
• Raw Cacao beans – not everyone is gonna have these. More of a health diva ingredient. But I am giving you the best recipe that I know and if you put these things in, you will thank me for it.             
• Powdered raw cacao – Again a health nut thing, but the difference it prompts is glorious           
• Cacao butter – yeah, you might not have this, if you do it will give a satisfying edge to the dish that people often complain lacks in vegan food as well as a lovely mirror sheen to the sauce             
• Harissa paste – It’s arabic but it works in here 
• Sweet paprika 
• Hot smoked paprika – 2 paprikas and 3 types of chilli might seem ott but that’s Mexican cuisine for you.            
• 2/3rds + of a lemons worth of Lemon zest ideally cut into strips or chunks, not grated. Thinly sliced pieces of lemon instead will do fine though this alters the quantity of lime juice that you will want to put in. 
• lime juice           
• whole cumin seed          
• fennel seed       
• Cinnamon          
• Olive oil               
• tomato paste  
• tinned tomatoes – don’t go cheap with tinned tomatoes. Cheap tinned tomatoes have this horrible acidic quality to them that is impossible to neutralise without f***ing up your dish. You don’t need to go extravagant but not bottom rung. Ever.
• Peppers               
• Mushrooms      
• Kidney beans   
• Butter beans    
• Black beans – tins of kidney beans and 5 bean mix are fine as long as they are just in water      
• Veg stock            
• Red wine     
• Fresh parsley   
• Fresh coriander (cilantro)

Method

1. First peel and smash your garlic.
2. Chop warty bits off but leave some skin on a SMALL amount of ginger (that taste wants to be undetectable in the background and finely mince with the garlic.
3. Heat up your pan and rub the fennel and cumin seed between your hands before dropping them into the warm pan together with your chopped up dried poblanos (or other dried, fruity chillis) and chipotle and gently toast them for a while. You’re going by smell and not colour to see if the toasting is done. If your kitchen smells amazing, you’re done.
4. Add a generous load of olive oil and keep the heat on fairly low.
5. Then add finely chopped onions to the mix, throw over a couple of pinches of salt and cook low until translucent.
6. Add your chopped mushrooms into the mix. I tend to cut them into a variety of sizes.
7. When the mushrooms are almost cooked through, add your chopped peppers.After a little bit of frying (a couple of minutes) add your beans and again cook for a couple of minutes.
8. Add your minced garlic and ginger along with your chopped hot chillis and stir around, cooking “til fragrant” – 30 seconds to a minute should do it.
9. Add your cacao powder (hint it’s not a primary flavour), cacao beans (about 5 – 8), harissa, lemon zest, sweet paprika (hint; a workhorse of the dish), hot smoked paprika and cinammon.
10. Stir everything around to get it coated and a little bit cooked but it’s easy to burn paprika in this state and that will ruin your dish. Your heat should still be fairly low. this step shouldn’t take long: a minute or two tops.
11. Add red wine, lime juice and tinned tomatoes. I tend to use a single tin of tomatoes as a chilli is based more around the other ingredients for flavour than tomato. It’s not a bolognese, the tomato is there for fruitiness, body and sweetness
12. Add some veg stock and a decent squirt of tomato paste and taste. You’ll be reducing this sauce so keep it on the side of “not salty enough.”
13. Cover and leave to simmer on a low heat for a long time. Give it a stir occasionally and you can add most things to tune the taste as you like. The chillis and garlic are an exception to this. I tend to tune things with the cinammon, raw cacao powder, harrisa, tomato paste, wine, lime juice and stock at this point.
14.  Cover and leave to simmer some more with the occasional stir. Leaving the chilli to cool and sit overnight will result in an even better flavor.              
15. When you are close to serving, give a final tune if you think it needs it (at this point seasoning with final salt is good as hopefully you’ll have underplayed the salt up to this point).Adding a knob of cacao butter and stirring it in as it melts makes the whole affair look better, then add chopped parsley and a load of chopped coriander (unless you are cooking for one of those unfortunate people to whom coriander tastes like awful soap).

Hey presto! If my directions aren’t impossible to follow and if you didn’t mess up (particularly burning paprika/chillis etc) then you will be in utter wonderment at this dish. You will be slapping bowls of pub chilli away from you with disdain and invoking the ire of those around you by demanding to know how many varieties of chilli are in the chilli or if the cook knows that authentic Mexican cuisine often has chocolate as an ingredient.

Variations

Eff off. In case it wasn’t apparent: I’m proud of that one.