Chili, beans and flexibility

I love good chili, and I love good pinto beans (“red beans,” my grandmother called them).

But until Saturday, I had never put them together in the same pot for a very good and simple rationale. Chili is great, and red beans are great, but when you put them together, each loses something to the other. You can’t combine uniques. Blend black with white, you get gray.

I have, however, been in an experimenting mood lately. It goes with getting married. I think that must be true of getting married at any age. No matter how deep your love or eternal your vows, at the breakfast table the first morning in your new home, you look across the table and see a complete stranger. Adjustments begin, and continue, and routinely press hard against what you believed were lifelong principles.

So I decided to make chili with beans, to demonstrate to Karen that I possess flexibility.

I was curious, too. I have had my share of homemade chili with beans in it, and every time, the proud chef had made chili into which he or she had dumped a couple of cans of kidney beans, with foreseeable results. Never had I tried chili into which raw beans had been cooked.

So I got my three pounds of chili grind (half beef, half pork), onions, chiles, etc, and half a pound of dried pinto beans. I soaked the beans overnight and into morning made the chili, to which I added the soaked beans just at the beginning of the simmering period.

The result? Gray. Ordinarily, I’ll fix a pound of dried pinto beans with half a pound of diced bacon, a diced onion softened in the drippings over high heat until a brown glaze forms in the bottom of the pot, some leftover coffee to deglaze the pot, then beans added with water barely to cover. The result? Unique. That was the flavor that lost itself to the chili, and took away some of the chili’s flavor.

I had thought by actually simmering the beans in the chili that the beans would pick up the chili-ness. Wrong. Beans are beans, canned or cooked, as surely as hamburger is hamburger. My wife tasted it, said it was bland. You have to understand that Karen is from the California-Missouri school of chili cooks. I need to get her a bowl of mild from The Texas Chili Parlor in Austin before she understands what heat is.

So if she said my chili was bland, she knew what she was talking about.

“It’s the beans,” I said.

“Not the beans,” she said. “I will make you a great bowl of chili that has beans in it.”

“Kidney beans,” I ventured.

“Kidney beans,” she confirmed. “I’ve made it for you already. Remember?”

“I remember. Sort of a ragout. A very tasty ragout.”

She will make it, and it will be good. But I am done with the effort myself. Principle met beans, and principle stands firm.