My wife and I have been putting on a Christmas Party for 40 years now. It started out as a family get together to decorate our tree. Initially I started making venison chili, using whitetail and then mule deer as the base meat. Since then I have graduated to elk chili. Several times I have made buffalo chili. Now, primarily I just cook elk chili. Our parties became so popular with family and friends that I had to make two pots of chili.
Since my wife was extremely limited in what she could help with this year (she is preparing to have her left knee replaced at the end of January) I had to do a lot of baking that I normally don’t get involved with. I actually enjoyed the baking aspect quite a lot. Preparation this year required a lot of multi-tasking on my part. I decided to try something different while preparing the chili this year. Instead of using my wok to cook the onions, ground elk and ground pork like I have been doing for years, I decided to do most of the cooking on my MAK. With the MAK set at 225, I could even introduce a little smoke flavor to my chili. I also decided to make the sauce separately and let it develop its flavor first before adding any meat. I have found previously that the ground meat will start to get “mushy” as a result of overcooking during the simmer stage if I put it all together at once. I usually add two spice dumps at different times during the process. Since I added the meat much later, I had to add a third spice dump when I re-seasoned toward prior to serving. It came out really good. I think I will be using this process again in the future.
Here are a few pictures of my Elk Chili, 2013.
Thawed elk meat, about 13.5 pounds.
Ground pork, about 7.5 pounds in the MAK.
Part of the elk meat in the MAK.
Onions prior to cooking, about 4.5 pounds.
The base sauce simmering and developing its flavor.
I used my LEM grinding tub to mix all the cooked elk and pork.
I used a 7 quart crock pot and the roaster pan to hold all the chili. This is what it looks like in the roaster pan. The roaster pan holds almost twice the amount of my crock pot. A whole lot of chili.
We had 65 people in attendance. I managed to save a couple of small containers of chili for myself. Warmed up a big bowl for lunch today. It really is better later.
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