When it comes to cooking for your
coworkers, you’re typically in one of two modes. There’s the standard food day mindset where
you fulfill your role in the delicious symphony of dishes organized by your
team; delighting in the oohs and aahs of your peers as they savor your culinary
creation. Food days are about peace and
love and carbohydrate overload. “Here,
have this homemade peanut butter brownie… and a hug.”
But not all brownies are served with a side of hug; some
are served with a merciless smirk and a burning rage by a maniac who has
promised to bring the world to heel via toffee crumbles and chocolate
shavings. This brownie isn’t for food
day and wasn’t made with love… This brownie is to rule them all; this brownie
is for the workplace cookoff.
Something changes in the human psyche when you substitute
competition for cooperation. With the
flip of a switch a man will change from Guy Fieri to Conan the Barbarian;
trading bowling shirts for a broadsword as he aims to destroy Flavor Town. It’s no longer important that you simply
enjoy their creation, but that you grant its flavor favor above all other
dishes. This is no longer about
delicious, it’s about destruction.
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| Conan demonstrates how to properly chop onions |
On Thursday, December 14th, I participated in a chili cookoff at work. This is an inside look at my chili preparation process.
Unlike most workplace competitions I’ve witnessed, this
chili cookoff was split into four separate categories: Texas Style, Homestyle, Vegetarian,
Flamethrower. From these, an overall
“Most Popular” would also be crowned.
Now, anyone who may have stumbled through the Orders department on
November 29th and witnessed the absolute circus of torture as we
sampled various hot sauces that ended in regret and suffering might have
correctly guessed ahead of time that I’d be entering the Flamethrower
division.
The Flamethrower division requires a delicate balance. Sure, Conan, you’re ready to burn these
metaphorical villages to the ground in the name of victory; but if you
LITERALLY burn the judges to the ground, you’re only going to succeed in
looking like a jerk. So while
“flamethrower” is certainly a license to open carry capsaicin into the
workplace, you still need to aim carefully or you might face a life-time
crockpot ban. Which, I can speak from
experience, is a real thing.
Beyond the concoction of a fantastic and fiery sauce, there
are a lot of choices that go into chili.
To start with, which meat(s) to use is of paramount importance. I kicked this question around for a full week
before the competition. Chicken? Beef?
Ground Turkey? Well, there’s one
thing that is absolutely required:
Candied bacon. Some people think
chili is about tomatoes or beans or the chili peppers that are required for a
dish to technically be chili. Those
people are wrong. Candied bacon is the
staple of any chili made in my kitchen; this is not negotiable. It’s true, the vegetarian category will never
be my home.
An important sidebar here:
I’m not above taking the easy exit in a cookoff. I once took second in a chili competition by
buying three cans of Campbell’s Chunky Chili and adding brown sugar and bacon
to it. Campbell’s Soup Company has a
market cap of 14.8 billion dollars; Ted from accounting drives a
twenty-year-old Ford Ranger… I took those odds and then took a nap. But now I’m older, and wiser, and that tiny
bit of pride I actually possess demands I deliver something fresher and
hopefully tastier than a reheated soup with a facelift. So it was off to the store! I’ve included my recipe in the sidebar, in
case you need your own kitchen adventure.
If you’re like me and you enjoy fresh ingredients in your
dishes, then you know food prep can be an onerous task. This is where I can offer you a tiny bit of
life advice, dear reader: Upgrade your
kitchen gear. Get a legitimate,
non-Target Brand knife set and some good cutting boards. Get a nice set of pots and pans and take good
care of them (they’ll last for a long, long time). Buy an Instant Pot (it’ll change your life)
and a good crock pot. Quality tools make
it easier to do a quality job, and when you can produce quality in your kitchen
cooking becomes far more enjoyable.
Of course, that’s not to say I actually produce quality in
my kitchen. I don’t own a cookbook
(except the Bob’s Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes for Joke Burgers) and I
like to shop without a list and only a vague idea of what I’m actually trying
to create. But hey, I’m good at chopping
vegetables, my chicken cooks quickly and to perfection, and I have plenty of
sauce pans in my test kitchen to experiment with my Blair’s After Death
sauce. Practice makes perfect, they say…
and hopefully guarantees the judges survive this experience.
The first practice run was an adventure
to be sure. On Thanksgiving, I heaped a
tablespoon of After Death sauce on my turkey.
I knew it was a bad idea, but sometimes you have to dive headfirst into
a bad idea if only for entertainment purposes.
Sweating, tears, and hiccups immediately materialized and I spent the
next half hour fighting my mouth inferno.
My second experience was on the ill-fated hot sauce tasting previously
mentioned, where we basically combined hot sauce with hot sauce until we could
see into other dimensions. So, yah, to
this point I have no idea how it will blend with other ingredients. The weekend prior to the cookoff I mixed a
teaspoon into a can of Campbell’s Chunky soup (I obviously love me some
Campbell’s) and stirred well. That
teaspoon was more than enough for the 12 ounces of chicken and dumplings as my
lips were ablaze for an hour after my meal.
It was obvious I would need to exercise caution.
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| Mmm, fresh chef-ables. |
I ultimately settled on six teaspoons of
hot sauce by taste testing throughout the process. There’s danger in this method, however. As the dish cooks, some of the liquids that
diluted the sauce evaporate and the concentration of hot sauce increases. So, you taste, sense a bit of fire, and make
a guess at how hot the dish will actually become. If you’re smart, you’ll actually have a cup
of your chili before you serve it to the judges so you know exactly what
they’ll go through. If you’re me, you
put it in the crockpot at 7:30 p.m., leave for volleyball, get home at about 11
p.m. and won’t feel like eating anything and shrug off the testing. I mean, how lethal can chili be? Then you have dreams of that one chili
cookoff where everyone got food poisoning from the bear chili and you wake up
in a cold sweat at 3 a.m. wondering if maybe you should possibly sneak into the
kitchen right now and have a cup. On the
other hand, though… sleep. Live life on
the chili edge, my friends.
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| This is not a toy... |
Of course, if you live on the edge, you
have to be prepared for the consequences.
When the reviews came back mixed, I knew I was immediately out of the
running for best chili overall.
Actually, I knew that as soon as one of the judges said, “I don’t like
spicy food.” After the tasting, I
received a mixture of comments somewhere between “It was delicious and I went
back for more” and “I need more milk, why did you make it so hot?!” Why?
Why did man first mount a horse?
Why do people keep venomous snakes as pets? Why did we dream of playing hopscotch on the
moon? There’s an intrinsic drive in humanity
to test our limits, face our fears head on, and push forward into new
frontiers. I knew the sauce was
potentially dangerous, but it had to be done.
Humanity may stop to look, but we always leap.
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| Lookin' tasty! |
When the supply of chili was obliterated and the votes
finally tallied, Chris Hains and his Texas Style Steak Chili stood alone as the
day’s big winner by securing the votes of both the judges and the crowd at
large. Apparently things like “steak”
and “not setting faces and GI tracts on fire” are admirable traits in food
competitions. For his efforts, Chris
brought home a sweet prize of 84 dollars
and the peace of mind that comes with obliterating your work place rivals. Surely, Hains-ville would rest easy that
night. Chris Davidson also graced the
podium, placing third with his own Homestyle Chili and netting a $10 prize.
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| The point of this was to win, let's not lose sight of that. But once that option's gone, burning the place down is a pretty satisfying outcome. |
And me? I failed in
my quest to burn Flavor Town to the ground (unless Flavor Town is a place that
lives in the hearts and minds of the judges who were forced to guzzle bottles
of milk after trying my chili… In which case I definitely burned it down). But I happily took second place and my $20
bounty; semi-successfully walking that fine line between consuming my foes in
an inferno and finding favor with fiery flavor amongst the judging panel. They may have both brought me to the same
place, but the fear and uncertainty of deploying a ridiculously hot sauce in a
chili cookoff made this experience far more entertaining and gratifying than
following a “color by numbers” recipe or reheating a can of soup.
