Chili Con Bambi

Hypothetical situation: You’ve been invited to a chili cook-off. You begin to panic….how do you compete? What can you create using the medium of chili that will demonstrate what a creative genius you are?

Well, let’s size up your competition. There are going to be a couple generic ground beef and bean chili’s. Some of them are going to be pretty good; some of them are going to be really spicy. There will be a lot of macho who can eat whose chili meta-contests…but in the end a chili cook-off is not a contest to see who can sneak the most capsaicin into a dish. No problems there. Someone will use chicken and possibly call their dish white chili. This dish will be tasty but people will mentally disqualify it because everyone knows chili is supposed to be red. You can go around changing the color of chili and expect to be taken seriously. Someone will insist on bringing meatless chili. This person should be slapped and sent home. Someone will brag about how their chili uses choice cuts of honest-to-god steak and not ground beef; they will also probably recite a list of exotic spices and mumble about their secret blend. People love to fall for this gourmet sounding gibberish. This person is your actual competition.

Don’t be tricked into playing their game. One ups-menship is for the insecure. You need to walk in there with a totally different chili (that is still red and meat based) - you need to bring venison chili. Besides being slamming good chili, venison chili lets you tell your own tale. Express your rugged individualism by showing people what chili was like when men where men and deer where cows, before the gentrification of American society. I’ll show you how.

First off, secure a giant-ass deer shank. I find that one magically appears in my freezer about once a year (this year two of them spontaneously appeared). If your freezer is broken and doesn’t create chunks of meat you might have to resort to finding a coworker or friend that hunts. If that fails I suppose you could go hunting…but that involves spending copious amounts of time out in the woods…where nature is. I typically avoid nature at all costs, so I view this as a desperate move of last resort.

Once you have a giant-ass deer shank you’ll need to marinate it. I like to throw mine in a giant Ziploc bag with a bottle of red wine. I’m not exactly sure how this is supposed to work. Generally a brine or marinade has some sort of salt component, but this is what I’ve done with good results. The next day smoke and/or grill your venison shank. I like low and slow. This last time I used the Black Evil Egg and was very happy with the results. What’s that? You want to see an informational graph which illustrates what a venison shank on an Egg might look like? I could never deny such a reasonable request.

Clicky for big.

After a day of cooking you should be rewarded with a shank that looks like something that could grace the table of a renaissance feast. Go ahead and slice off some meat for dinner if you like. There will be plenty to go around. After the shank has rested put the rest in the fridge for tomorrow….for tomorrow you make chili!

The next day dice up about two pounds of grilled deer shank, the chunks should be bite sized so I like about a ¾” dice. I’ve been following this recipe with a few modifications. Since your deer is already cooked ignore the venison browning at the beginning of step 2. I suppose you could fry your bacon separately….but I just dice it up and add it to the butter, onions, and garlic. A little extra bacon fat isn’t going to hurt the flavor (au contraire). Also I don’t wait around for 7 cups of liquid to reduce down to 3 ½ cups. The recipe claims that it might happen in about 30 minutes…but recipes lie through their teeth when it comes to reducing. Other than that I pretty much follow the recipe and serve over rice.

Be prepared to be hailed as the culinary genius you are.