I've been feeling depressed lately so I decided it was time to drown the noise in an arduous cooking project.

I've made many wonderful chilis in my time but I always used store-bought stocks/broths when doing so, and I always thought it would be fun to make a homemade stock, so that's what I'll be doing today

Here we have a whole chicken, ham hocks, half an onion, carrots and celery, and some smash garlic that are hiding under the other ingredients. Normally when I make chicken stock I add whole allspice and other warming ingredients (I recently tried a cinnamon stick and that was wonderful) but I don't think I want those flavors in this chili. So instead I'm using whole peppercorns and sichuan peppercorns. We'll see how it turns out!

I've never done this with ham hocks before but I've used them in a number of red bean recipes and I really like the subtle flavor they add, and they're cheap

I have one more thing I'm preparing today that I will use some of the stock for, so you can look forward to that ​​

The stock is done. I cooked it for a very long time (at least 2.5 hours), pulling out the meat once it started falling off the bone, letting it cool, stripping away the skin and bones and overly fatty bits, and then throwing the bones back in. It's delicious ​​

Normally when I make chili like this I end up using four cups of stock but I only have three cups (see attached image), but since this is heavily reduced it will be perfectly fine if I add some water to the chili if necessary.

Now, on to the next step!

Next, as opposed to using a chili powder, we'll make a chili paste from dried chilies

Here I took 2 ancho chilis, 2 guajillo chilis, 2 cascabells, and 1 arbol chili and deseeded them and stripped them into little pieces. (Some say the seeds make things to spicy, others claim they can make the result too bitter. I've never tested these claims but have always deseeded them anyway, let me know if you have any insight!) We toast them a bit to bring out a little extra flavor and then simmer them in some of our chicken stock (I used a little more than one cup) until they are soft

In general I find I prefer to make meals like this quite a bit below my preferred spice level because they tend to get a lot spicier after a few days in the fridge. If I spice the dish to my preferred amount the day I make it, it is way too spicy two days later. On the other hand, I can always pump up the spice with hot sauce when I eat it at the table.

For this reason all of the chilis here are not very spicy, aside from the arbol of which I only used one

After this I toasted 2 tbsp of cumin seeds and 1 tbsp of coriander (last time I did this I felt the coriander was a bit too pronounced so I'm using less than I normally use) and then ground them up in a mortar and pestle

After that I added 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tbsp marmite, 1 tbsp fish sauce (this amount does not leave any fishy flavor whatsoever), a healthy squeeze of tomato paste (I didn't measure it but it was probably 1-2 tbsp), 1 tbsp of adobo sauce from the can of chipotle, and 1 chopped chipotle pepper to the dried chili + stock and blended it all up. I removed the cap from the blender and covered it with a towel since blending hot liquids can cause can weird things to happen with the pressure inside the blender and cause dangerous explosions

The result is incredible tasty (if not a bit salty, although this will be seasoning a massive amount of food later). The amount of umami might even be illegal ​​

I forgot to mention that I shredded the chicken and chopped the ham hocks and am saving that meat for later. I didn't take any pictures so you will just have to imagine it ​​

The final task for tonight is simple: let's soak some beans for tomorrow.

I'm using three red varieties from Rancho Gordo that are great for stews: the leftmost is "mother stallard" which have this beautiful white speckled pattern and are extremely creamy for beans that hold their shape in stews, the top right is "Domingo Rojo" which are like a cooler kidney bean, they're very very big, very very tasty, and hold their shape wonderfully and make an incredibly rich starchy broth when cooked, and "Red Hidasta" which are basically your standard "small mexican red bean".

I'm using a 1/2 cup of the the top right and 1/4 cups of the others for a total of 1 cup of dried beans, which is something close to four cans of canned beans. This is gonna be a massive meal ​​

I add some salt to the water, which I always do and I have no idea why. I've never tested what happens if I don't add the salt. If you have any insight do let me know!

now it's time clean the dishes ​​​​​​​​​​

It's day 2 and more delicious plans are in the making ​​

I took at look at the stock this morning and it is nice and jiggly. You can see the fat at the top, which I decided to skim. This is a matter of preference, as the fat is perfectly edible and can make the broth nice and silky. Normally I don't bother skimming my stock but I want to use lots of beef tallow in the chili later (in my experiments I really like the flavor tallow adds) and I don't want to add too much fat, since I will be adding some high-fat meat to the dish later.

Anyway, today I will be preparing the beans. I could make the chili after that (and I usually do), but I have some errands to take care of this evening so that will have to wait for tomorrow

I am going to try something interesting this time. When you prepare beans they add a lot of starch to the water and it makes the broth starchy and delicious, especially if you use quality beans. So I thought I might try to infuse bean starch from all three bean varieties I am using in my stock ​​

To prepare the beans I will boil them in last night's stock with onion, garlic, bay leaves, and chili peppers (cascabels are my favorite dried chili right now, great balance of flavor and heat.) I will have to add additional water since I only have two cups of stock remaining.

I didn't smash the garlic because I will be reusing it for all three bean varieties, and I should get plenty of flavor extraction this way

You can add frightening amounts of salt when preparing beans, but I have overdone it before, so I will be quite conservative with the salt. I will add more salt to taste in the final dish, and there will be tons of additional salt from yesterday's chili paste, so I will get a proper salting eventually

Unfortunately got the heat too high and some of the beans stick to the bottom. I scraped them just in time to avoid burning but this caused many of the beans to burst ​

I ended up losing about half the beans. Luckily I'm doing this in three stages so I'll still have plenty of beans in the end ​​

The evening "errand" I had to run got in the way of the beans, hence the massive half in updates. I came back and finished the final batch of beans. I added a little extra salt to it and the resulting bean-liquer-infused stock is really quite something ​​

Here is the most significant fruits of my labor here: some chili paste, stock, and prepared beans. What isn't shown in the shredded chicken and chopped ham hocks

Just one more step for tonight and then I'm done!

Here is the primary meat for the chili: pork shoulder! Pork shoulder can be used in any situation you would use stewing beef like chuck roast, although it tends to shred instead of keep its shape (this is why it is often used for tacos or pulled pork sandwiches). It is wonderfully savory and fatty and incredibly delicious for the price ​​

I'm using a little over 2 lbs here, which when combined with the chicken and ham hocks will result in an extremely meaty chili

I'm salting them over a wire rack and leaving them in the fridge overnight. This will cause the salt to be absorbed in the meat (any maybe pull out some moisture I think? which might make it brown more easily? I dunno). I've never done this before for chili but it wasn't too difficult so I thought it was worth a try, we'll see how it goes!

It is day 3 and even more delicious plans are in the making ​​

I happened to acquire a large number of peppers in the past week so I figured I would use them all in my chili ​​

Normally I fry the peppers with the onions but I have so many that I don't think I'll get any browning because of how many there are, so this time I will toss them in the oven with some oil and a heavy pinch of salt

My roommates also acquired this enormous head of garlic which I begged them to let me roast and put in the chili. They acquiesed

I've never put roasted garlic in chili before so we'll see how this goes!

I taste tested the Magical Chili Paste and it is much less spicy than I anticipated, so I will add two habaneros to the chili. I like to mince them fine to avoid a situation where someone gets a large chunk of habanero in a spoon full

Now I get to play the minigame known as "clodboy don't touch your eyes for two days challenge" ​​

Time to brown the meat! By browning it we get delicious maillard reaction flavors and create fond at the bottom of the pot that we can deglaze for even more flavors later 🤤

I put a tiny bit of beef tallow in the pot for the first batch of meat, additional won't be necessary because of the additional fat that will be added from the fatty pork shoulder ​​

awwwwwwwwww yeah 🤤

Now it's time to collect that fond by sweating out some holy trinity ​​