Eight O'Clock came around and it was time to take the travails of the night and set them aside. We burn ourselves down from time to time. We become fluid and swallow fire and evaporate, but there is a law of conservation, and these are old lessons.
I had struck against walls before and backed down. Was something different this time? Was the idea of ego permanently and irrevocably relinquished? Had the self been transcended for good? No of course not. I'm just cooking a couple gallons of chili for a bunch of people I don't know, seven of whom will be judging me.
So what changed in me that made it feel so fresh, so different? I had taken the bramble and torn it from the rose. Slowly, bit by bit, pulled them apart. I had bled out. Fallen asleep, woke up stirred the pot. And then I walked to the store. I felt a different smile that had evaded my face for a week. It had had itself shaken for a week.
There was a fresh glow on the road. The load in my arms seemed lighter. I was tired and delirious and reallyy had probably recouped about 35 minutes of sleep total between two hours of stirrings, but my brain was putting itself gradually back together. I had put everything into what was there. It wasn't going anywhere. It was what it was; stock, butt, and bacon.
When I arrived home and was preparing to do a final boil down before the gravy, I collected myself and waited. I turned up the heat on the pot until all 16 pounds (minus shoulder bones and 1 qt of blob)of pulled pork and 2 pounds of bacon and watched it started to simmer. Once it had a nice roll to it, and a skim started to form on top, I added the beer. The 24 ounces of Chambly just rushed up like linen and hops and sweet and sour and astringent. I let it froth for a minute or so, then followed with a pot of coffee (Costa Rican, earlier I had been using an AMAZING roast out of Brazil from Brioso, but decided it was too good not to just drink; and besides I had bought the CR for the chili).
So basically the chili is full steam under pot. All you need to do is kick back and push it with reduction after reduction, keep adding spices as you see fit, add more peppers as necessary (I think I added three more anaheims, though I know I should have topped it off with another cup of peppers). Remember, you're going to gravy this up so stronger than you think will be fine at this stage.
What's next? Cooling garnish and Candying bacon.
Here's the rub:
What we're going to do is pour this chili in those miso bowls. There will already be a spoon and a 2/3 stick of candied, apple-smoked bacon in there. Then we're going to drizzle with a sour cream / cream cheese garnish and dust with magic dust.
This chili hits like a truck. Or, more specifically, once you put a nice big old bite in your maw, it's like someone hits you in the face with a palm. After a few bites it is like someone has filled your head with cement. But once the sting of the facepalm wears off and you open your eyes, you chew down and there is this rush of textures playing all over your mouth. From the three typical textures of bacon, to the six or so different textures in pulled pork, you start chewing your way through the coriander flavored cement. Then, all of a sudden, sparks start shooting down your throat from the peppers and gradually the feeling of suffocating inside your own head throbs down to calm from the soothing olfactory spices and the garnish.
The magic dust is a combination of nutritional yeast (has a cheesy taste and is more interesting to present than shreds), ground orange rind (to pick up on all the orange juice in the chili), and ground coffee (to take the bitter edge off the rind). Also, having a dust was meant to do a 'inform the nose to condition the mouth' kind of thing.
Candy Bacon:
Easy peasy here.
Put skewers or a cookie rack on a cookie sheet. Put a few cups of brown sugar in a big ziploc. Toss bacon in light brown sugar until good and coated. Lay across rack. Add extra brown sugar. Bake until shiny.
Now for as easy as this is, do it up.
The cookie sheet is going to be spitting grease. It is going to be covered in brown sugar. There's a couple of ways to play this. What I did was siphon off the grease into the chili.
An alternative, and something I kind of succeeded at by complete accident, was create bacon brittle and bacon candy (in addition to the candied bacon). It was amazing. you could try to render the crystallized bacon-sugar in such a way as to have a topping. Anyway, this is the home stretch, have fun, but give it a moment's thought ahead of time in case you want to try to do any of those things effectively.
Cooling Garnish:
At any point that you had five minutes, or at this point, you can mix this up. For this quantity, I used two blocks of cream cheese and two pints of sour cream. Now I mixed in chopped chocolate, and then some black pepper and salt. The insipration for this was that I wanted something stiffer than normal sour cream, and I looked to bacon ice cream. The first suggestion was to thicken the cream cheese and sour cream mixture with arrow root. I've never used it before, have no idea what it would have done, but was willing to try. Another suggestion was to turn it into ice cream.
Where I should have gone with this, it was BaconCamp after all, is added some bacon fat to the mix. I ground up some of the candied bacon and crumbled some of the leftovers in later; but to really knock boots I should have candied the bacon earlier in the night, and reserved some of that fat for the garnish. Oh well, next time.
Competitive Rush:
For anyone that had been following my twitterfeed, the time between 'good morning sweet chili' and 'ready to pack' encapsulated the whole of this post so far. My cousin Jimmy was able to help out with the transportation, my room mate Glen also offered too. As basically happened with the last batch of HHHC, they were the only people that I know who got to try it.
The emotional exercise of the night had given way to an endorphin fed electricity; whereas I had been a capacitor for the night, the dawn was turning me into a conductor. I was channeling energy and focus and attention I had not seen in a long time. There is a purity sprinters talk about, I feel close to it on my bike occasionally, but I was in it that morning. My mind was operating at a level of clarity and accuracy that I'd never felt before. There had been minor tastes while working as a line cook, but a 12 hour marathon of cooking was a different matter entirely.
I had to delegate a few tasks toward the end. Jimmy was kind enough to also wash the plating dishes and spoons, I stopped taking photos but Glen got in a couple (hopefully I will have those up soon). At this point I knew what needed to get finished and done and what it looked like, but they proved invaluable for making sure loose ends got tied up.
Basically, aside from pulling together everything I would need to take with me (big pot of chili, cooling garnish, magic dust, plating stuff, serving stuff, towels, utensils), the last step to the chili itself was to make a big ol' mess of roux (approximately 11 o'clock) and fold the liquid back in to gravy it up. I got this taken care of and by 11:45 was sitting on the back porch smoking and going through last minute details.
The picture of the roux was the initial beginning of it (yes, that all roux, all from bacon grease, no liquid yet). I probably rouxed up about 3-4 cups of flour or more to thicken up the chili.
The chili came out like velvet. I know that doesn't sound right. Normally it's chunky and chewy. Now mind you, its is chewy; just in a very pleasingly smooth way like ice cream. The shredded pork layers sublimely between everything and the flavor explodes.
Honestly, there's nothing quite like it. HHHC takes a long time. You need to walk through a lot of hoops just to get to the fundamental animal itself. All plating and judge considerations aside. Just getting this stuff to the bowl is an epic journey. From the injection of the marinade, to the hours spent smoking the meats, to the time laboring over the stock and the incorporation of the meat and the final turn of the stock to gravy, this is a greater labor of love than any other pot of chili I have ever made. Cooking it in such a quantity I really took stock of the minute transformations.
Every note came out a surprise. Every step an immersion in focus. Shinzen Young, in his book the Science of Enlightenment, builds a metaphor around the particle/wave duality of nature. Whereby there are times, like when you're turning the wheel, driving a car where you are operating from a particle sense of self. There are other times where you are opening yourself to the world around you, letting your guard and expectations drop and embracing your inner wave nature.
When you marathon cook you start off at the particle end of the spectrum. Each item has a corresponding action, each movement has a corresponding meaning and purpose. As you drill down, keep working through the particulate layers, dissolving them with sustained rigor. Eventually once you notice everything is happening the way it will happen, you can open your mind up to that wave mind. The wave mind will push you through to the end; it electrifies every moment, it creates space inside to facilitate conductivity of wave in the world.
Learning to harness and manifest as the wave self is what is happening when you flow. You are prepared for every outcome without anticipating any like water washing against the shore. When you are open to this, and unexpecting everything, you will also begin to savor every step more; and for what is really there rather than what's next or what is past.
By pushing past that particulate self, and opening to the exact thing you're doing, whether it's pulling pork or pouring off burnt brown sugar and bacon grease, or talking to a friend, transitioning into the wave self can help us handle situations more fluidly. We become locked in protecting that particle self too often, we are thrown into disequilibrium when that alfredo turns grainy from simmering at too high a temperature. We become blocked and can't salvage it because we fixate on the past instead of the pot in front of us.
PBS: Really entering this openness, where what's really there is actually present to the mind, and whats past and next is not observed, we are able to interpret better. Some of us people are mixed message machines (myself), or over-think too much (myself), or assign too much significance to events without considering what is actually present (frequently). These things either distract us or rely on distractions. Whether we seek to immerse in focus, or pushing distraction to the point of a hard reset of the mind set we are working with, the goal is to surpass disequilibrium. Acting from distraction is not a way to re-enter equilibrium.
Being goes on being regardless of distraction; but the mind becomes blocked, switching from the particle to the wave disregards our tenuous grasp on the correspondence of reality with our internal ligatures, and turns on the ability for us to thread coherence through action in being.
Up next, BaconCamp itself and a rundown.
Update on 4:50PM by
mfg
