Chef Demo - White chicken chili

So to start we’re going to do a little bit of olive oil in our sauce pot, non-stick as you can see too I’m sure- less oil. We’re going to start with a little bit of onion and some chicken in there. You’re recipes call for raw chicken cubed up, that’s fine. If you have some leftover chicken *** from something you grilled the night before that’s fine. If you want to use ground turkey that’s fine too. Any kind of poultry that’s going to be a lean meat, a white meat really. So we’re just going to sauté that for a little bit. For the magic of television we’re not going to cook everything down. Adding into that afterwards, I believe your recipes call for spices after basically everything is sautéed. A good trick when you’re making soups and sauces that you can use is just before they’re actually done, just before they’re translucent, start putting you’re spices in there because it opens them up a lot faster. So then, say if you’re making a soup or spaghetti sauce or something and you put all your dry spices in at the end and you stir it and then you’ve got to simmer it on the stove for 4 hours. Well if you throw your spices in there ahead of time, especially dry spices, it just rehydrates them and gets that flavor out a little bit quicker so it can incorporate into the sauce a bit faster. So for this we’re going to do a bit of cumin, just a pinch of cayenne. And obviously if the crowd that you are serving at the tailgate likes things spicier, go ahead and use some more. A little bit of garlic and of course you can substitute fresh garlic with that too. And then some oregano. Most people think of oregano as being an Italian style spice, well it is, but it’s also very predominant in southwestern cuisine. So that’s like something if you’ve had a tortilla soup or if you’ve had almost any chili that you’re going to have commercially has a bit of oregano in it. So we’ll sauté that, then we’re going to give it some chicken stock. I think the recipe calls for a cup and a quarter, if I recall. And then we’ll just let that simmer. Also, adding to that are green chilies and you might have heard that called green mountain chili or chili verde or white chili, white bean chili, all sorts of different names. Basically what it means is a lighter colored bean with a lighter colored meat simmered together into a chili with similar southwestern style of flavors added to it like cumin, coriander, things like that. Now you’re recipe also calls for cilantro. Personally, I’m of the belief that there’s no sense in using cilantro unless you’re using fresh cilantro. It’s all about the freshness and the brightness of the flavor that’s there rather than the dried cilantro which is basically going to give you about as much flavor as dry parsley. So what we’ll do is have a little bit of cilantro to finish that later. We’re going to set this off to the side now to let it simmer. And then we’ll come back to it and when we serve it up we’ll put a little bit of shredded cheese on top of it, put a little scallion and fresh cilantro right into the soup just beforehand. So we’re just going to let that simmer over here. Now if you notice that it might need a little bit more stock, that’s fine put some more stock in it. If when you’re making it at home and it looks like you put too much stock in it that’s fine you can fix that it’s really easy. There’s a few way you could actually thicken up a white bean chili like that. One would be to make a masa slurry, and that would be like cornmeal and a little bit of water and that’s not really going to impart any sodium or too much more calories to it. The other way to do it would be to add a little bit more bean to it and puree it with one of those little stick blenders that everyone’s got at home- we call it a boat motor in the kitchen. It works fantastic for grinding up other vegetables like that.