The Short Life of Chili Chili Bang Bang

When it comes to cooking contests, only one place will satisfy me, and that's first place. Anything less and I'll be out in the parking lot, tampering with the brakes on the judges' vehicles. Friday was the highly anticipated chili cook off, where I debuted Chili Chili Bang Bang for the entire world. Did I walk away with the gold, or with a shirt covered in brake fluid? The only way to find out is to read on.

After some brief perusing of the recipe sites on the web, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the ingredients in chili. Meat, peppers, and tomatoes is simple enough, but I knew such a prosaic combination was a one way ticket to 3rd Place-ville. If I wanted to win, I needed secret ingredients, and assloads of them.

With this in mind, I hit the supermarket. I'm not a big fan of lists; I prefer to wander the aisles and let the cooking gods whisper the ingredients into my ears. Usually this either works really well, setting me up perfectly to create a wonderful meal, or I end up checking out with a cart full of pickles and flea spray. This time, the cooking gods told me, "Peppers. Lots of peppers, and the weirder they're shaped, the better." They also mentioned something about spiking the chili with beer. Who am I to rebel?

It's hard to see in the picture above just how many peppers I had, but I easily spent $15 just on peppers. That takes some doing. A single pepper is usually like $.10, so for the quantity I needed, I had to rent a tugboat to get all of them home.

Once I had the ingredients, I got to cooking. Step 1: brown some meat and some onions. This was really the only part that could be considered cooking, so I figured once I finished this step, I'd be home free.

And then, I opened up my tomato paste, only to discover there was no paste. Instead, I had a bunch of humongous tomato lumps. The lumps were so big at that point, I could've safely titled my dish, Tomato Lumps with Meat. Something had to be done.

First, I tried mushing the lumps up. After a few minutes of this, I had a bunch of slightly smaller tomato lumps.

Then, inspiration struck: I could spoon those lumps. Good bye Tomato Lumps with Meat, hello Chili Chili Bang Bang!

I added my peppers.

Followed by copious amounts of the first secret ingredient.

And then the second.

Ending up with this concoctation. Mmmmm, that's vaguely chiliesque!

I put the lid on the crockpot and then I went to bed. Around 1 in the morning, I woke with a start. "What in the hell is that awful smell?" I wondered. It didn't so much smell like a simmering pot of chili as it smelled like someone had replaced all of my furniture and possessions with road kill that had been soaked in liquor.

The smell was so strong, I couldn't sleep. I'm telling you, it was so painful, it was like the chili was keeping me as its POW. No matter how bad it smelled, I didn't want to interrupt the potent chili fermentation process.

The next morning, I woke up to see the following. Note the ring of death around the circumference of the crockpot.

I took a bite and barely kept from wetting myself. It was, without question, the spiciest bite of food I'd ever put in my mouth. The chili hadn't soaked in the peppers so much as it had enraged the peppers, leading to some sort of spicy fight to the death. No one's taste buds would be left standing.

Thinking quickly, I cracked open another beer and poured it in there, hoping that would neutralize the peppers. Ehh, not quite. Instead of being absorbed into the chili, the beer just floated on top.

It was now time for me to go to work, and my final assessment of Chili Chili Bang Bang was not a good one. The chili itself was incredibly spicy and really unappealing to look at; none of that was helped with the standing pool of alcohol I added to the top of the bowl. To really emphasize the disgusting nature of the chili, I considered forcing the cat to take a dump in it. But no, I had no time for that; the contest was about to begin.

As can be seen above, there were around 10 entries. Disturbingly, most of them resembled chili a lot more than Chili Chili Bang Bang did.

Just to let the other contestants know who they were dealing with, I printed out a placard that read, "Chili Chili Bang Bang: The only guarantee is digestive discomfort."

After all of the entries were set up, the contest began. Right away, I knew I made an impression. As soon as the lid of the pot came off, the oohs and ahhs started. "Man, that is weird looking," I heard someone say. "Holy crap, Chili Chili Bang Bang is SPICY." Really, the entire room got swept up in the discussion of my creation (Patrick can back me up there). We weren't supposed to reveal who made the dishes, so all I could do was to sit at a table and giggle furiously into the napkin.

While a lot of people talked about it, no one really came out and said, "Man, this is good!" Mostly they were just remaking on how bizarre it was. Sometime during the middle of this, a second panel of judges appeared. I think they only caught a few bits of what the other judges were saying, because right after they appeared, I heard one of these new judges say, "Chili Chili Bang Bang is supposed to be the good one." Ha! Somehow, my plan was working.

The tasting continued for a while, and the entire thing killed me because I couldn't reveal which was mine. A couple of people knew, and one of them came up to me midway through the contest to say, "Dude, your chili just melted my cup." Inedible, unattractive, and destructive: let it never be said I can't put a meal together.

A few minutes later, everyone had voted and the first place winner was announced. The received a plaque and a gift certificate to Chili's. Three guesses as to whose name was on that plaque.

Yeah, I have no idea. I could only stand to eat a couple of bites of the stuff before I wanted to rip my tongue out, yet a crowd of 50 selected it as the best. It just goes to show that the only ingredient that really matters in the end is the alcohol.

Posted by Cody at April 17, 2005 6:27 PM