Recipe Review - Chile Sin Carne

This book has been in my collection probably longer than I care to admit.

Time for a recipe review! While I mostly want to do reviews of foods that you can just pick up at the store, sometimes I like to share recipes too. With sharing in mind, I do want to respect cookbook author's copyrights, and so I'm only reviewing recipes that are available online even if I'm originally finding it in my cookbook collection.

This particular recipe comes from Bryanna Clark Grogan's The (Almost) No Fat Cookbook. Although it says vegetarian on the cover, it's almost entirely vegan with the exception of honey in a few recipes, which is easily replaced. Something else to keep in mind with this cookbook is that it was published in 1994, so it does have a dated, almost retro-ish feel as far as (vegan) cookbooks go.

I have personally owned this cookbook almost for as long as I've been vegan (I went vegan in 1999) and there weren't a whole heck of a lot of vegan cookbook options at the time. I also have to admit that I haven't really made too many recipes from this cookbook. With the popularity of recipe blogs these days, printed cookbooks almost feel like a relic of the past these days. But I still love having a collection of cookbooks to peruse, and lately I've been making a greater effort to actually use them!

So the actual recipe I'm reviewing today can be found here, or on page 130 of the actual printed book. I'm not reposting it here, so might as well open it up on another browser tab for reference! Bryanna has a blog chock full of tasty sounding recipes here.

On to the review!



Ingredient Roundup. First of all, I like how all the ingredients are really, really basic and therefore easy on the wallet. Nothing too crazy, too "weird" or hard to find. Although, I do have an issue with a bit of vagueness with a few of the ingredients.

First of all, the recipe calls for chile powder, which is supposed to be just a pure ground up chile peppers, not to be confused with chili powder, which is a spice blend that most people use when making the meaty, beany, tomato-y dish known as chili. I'm assuming that Bryanna did indeed mean chile and not chili powder, but either way I was not able to find anything labeled as chile powder at all, half ancho or not. So for the chile powder I ended up using chipotle powder, which lended a nice smokiness to the stew.

Second, for the dried chile pepper, it does not specify what kind at all. I live in an area with a sizable mexican population, and dried peppers are easy to find in all sorts of varieties! So I more or less picked a variety at random and went with that. I'm sure red pepper flakes would work as well, just add as much as your heat tolerance will allow.

For quick reference, 2 cups of dry beans is one pound. I went with the TVP rather than the tofu, though I had both on hand. I also ended up using more garlic than the recipe called for, I always use more garlic. For the sweetener, I went with brown rice syrup since I have a jar in my fridge I've been trying to use up, but honestly it's such a small amount I think you could skip the sweetener unless the acidity from the tomato paste really needs to be tempered. I did not need the cornmeal, for reasons I'll explain below.

Prep & Cooking. This recipe as is does require a bit of preplanning since it uses dry beans. If you want to make this recipe more on the fly, you'll need four 15oz cans of beans to replace the dry. There's also methods for quick soaking beans as well.

Even before I started making this recipe, it seemed a bit off in it's water to bean ratio. I'm not sure if it intended for me to keep the water the beans were soaking in, because four cups of water is just not enough for this recipe. I ended up having to add a good bit more water (at least two cups) to keep the chili from getting too dry. Adding cornmeal to thicken just seemed absurd. Also, it seemed a bit off to me that all the ingredients were added all at once, as sodium (salt & soy sauce) and acidity (tomato paste) can prevent beans from cooking properly. I ended up cooking the beans solo until reasonably softened before adding the rest of the ingredients.

Completed recipe. It is very thick. Please pardon the dirty stove!

Nutrition. Thankfully this recipe (as well as all the rest in this cookbook) comes with a basic nutritional breakdown, huzzah! Quite frankly, I'm not terribly interested in running recipes through nutrition calculators.

The linked recipe left out the number of servings, the cookbook says it serves 6 "generously" .... Maybe it was the lack of liquid, but although I did breakdown what I cooked into 6 servings, I'd hardly call them generous servings. Decent, but not generous; a good main entree portion, but you'll definitely want something else on the side.

Actual nutrition breakdown can vary depending on ingredients used, and of course how the recipe ends up getting portioned out. The breakdown provided shows under 300 calories per serving, which is pretty awesome, all the more reason to add on some side dishes!

It's a great source of protein at 17 grams, most of that coming from the beans which are always good for you. No breakdown on how much of the carb is from sugar, but the recipe calls for only a whopping half teaspoon of added sugar, spread across 6 servings, that leaves me completely unconcerned about the sugar content. And fat? A whole 0 grams! Huzzah! Well, some of the ingredients do have some naturally occurring fats, but with no added fats in the recipe, I am once again unconcerned.

No breakdown of sodium, but if you're going the dry bean route, it's easy to adjust sodium. Most of the sodium in this recipe will come from the soy sauce, I would recommend using a low sodium variety if need be.

Also no breakdown of micronutrients (vitamins & minerals), but it's good wholesome ingredients, so there's that.

Overall, this is a very healthy recipe.

Results.  I ended up burning this chili a little, but I'm blaming that one on myself rather than the lack of liquid in the recipe. Burned flavor aside, this did make for a very flavorful chili. Still, I would highly recommend upping the cooking liquid to 6-8 cups as it was super, super thick. I think 4 cups might be fine if you go the lazy route and opt for canned beans.

Also, I apologize for the lack of pictures on this post, I intended to take pics of the various steps along the way, but it would seem I forgot. I promise I'll do better on my next recipe review!