Gourmet Chili Cookbook: Everything You Want to Know About Chili and More.

By Michael Bové

My Gourmet Chili Book

There is nothing more filling and satisfying than a good hot bowl of real gourmet Chili. This book offers truly gourmet recipes for Chili lovers versus those regular recipes found in other cook books. I found those were not gourmet at all, no information about ingredients, and methods to create a really gourmet bowl of Chili.

The author wants to appeal the true connoisseur in all of us and provide an easy procedure and list of all ingredients needed, that can transform the Chili you make for friends and family into a wonderful dining experience.
This book also includes a section of gourmet Salsas to eat with gourmet Chili with sour cream on top.

I hope you find a recipe in my book that will always be a winner for you and your family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665521062

Michael Bové

I am a Vietnam War era veteran who served in the Navy at Pearl Harbor. After I got out of the Navy in 1974 I stayed in Hawaii and worked construction and used my GI Bill went to college there. I attended a church convention is Seattle Washington in the year 1976 where I meet my soon to be wife who had been living in Homer Alaska. We moved to Homer Alaska and ended up staying there in Alaska for 30 years and I took a retirement from working for the State. I just fell in love with the beauty and pristine wilderness found in Alaska. I opened a home remodeling business in Alaska which I owned for 6 years. After my wife passed away, I left Alaska and moved back to Virginia where I grew up as a small boy.

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Chili Peppers

Hot peppers have been a part of the human diet in America since at least 7500 BC. There is archaeological evidence in southwestern Ecuador that hot peppers were one of the first cultivated crops in America that are self-pollinating. Christopher Columbus was one of the first Europeans to encounter hot peppers. When the peppers were first introduced into Europe, they were grown in the gardens of Spanish and Portuguese monasteries. The monks experimented with the hot peppers and discovered that they could be used as a substitute for black peppercorns. At the time black peppercorn was extremely costly and used as legal currency in some countries.

Hot peppers were used around the globe after Diego Alvarez Chanca, a doctor on Columbus’s second ship to the West Indies in 1493, brought the first hot peppers to Spain. Diego Alvarez Chanca first wrote about the hot peppers medicinal effects in 1494.

From Mexico, hot peppers spread rapidly into the Philippines and then to India, China, Indonesia, Korea and Japan.

Peppers have been associated with civilization for thousands of years, making them some of the oldest seed food crops domesticated in the New World. After Columbus found them growing in the West Indies, they rapidly circulated the globe and influenced many cuisines. The peppers I am discussing are sweet red peppers that we most commonly see today as the big blocky high-shouldered hybrids. Many people who have not gardened are surprised to learn that red peppers are simply ripe green peppers, which perhaps says more about our disconnection from food than anything else. I was never a big fan of green peppers; I find their taste just a bit too unripe and, well, green. They are a bit better cooked, but there’s no comparison with letting peppers reach their full lush ripeness and enjoying their rich sweet taste.

While sweet green peppers are invariably called bell peppers, they come in a variety of shapes which are rarely seen in retail markets in the United States. They are the same species (Capsicum Annuum) as hot peppers, and when grown in close proximity may transfer the heat gene to the next generation. An innocuous-looking bell pepper offspring may turn out to be a very large hot pepper.

Capsicum annuum most likely originated in east-central Mexico around 6,500 years ago from wild chili pepper, or bird pepper (C. annuum var.

glabriusculum), a perennial shrub native to the northern half of Mexico that produces small pea like fruits. Seeds are spread by birds as their mouths are immune to the chemical Capsicum which makes the peppers hot to humans and as they migrate the seeds pass through them undigested and then grow in a new location. This is why chili peppers can be found from northern South America to the southwestern United States. Chili plants average 3 feet in height but in the right conditions can reach 9 feet. Chili peppers have a reputation of being fiery hot but all the dried samples I have consumed have been rather pleasant. C. annuum is one of four other domesticated peppers including C. chinense, C. frutescens, C. pubescens and C. baccatum. These species originate in South America, thus forming two separate areas of pepper domestication.

Most early descriptions of peppers in Mexico and the West Indies appear to refer to the hot types, and this could be for a variety of reasons. The only two species of Old World plants that brought any heat to food was the West African grains of paradise (Aframomum melegueta) that became supplanted by the far superior black pepper (Piper nigrum), whose trade and price was tightly controlled by the Dutch. Then hot peppers were discovered, which added a new important dimension to the palate, and could be grown in just about any moderate climate.

There were repeated introductions of various pepper varieties to the Old World from the New. It is clear that the Spaniards, being the conquerors of pepper growing regions of the New World, were the first to introduce them. They were further introduced to Europe via the Balkan Peninsula where they had been obtained by Ottoman Turks from their conquest of Portuguese colonies in Persia in 1513 and Indian islands in 1538. Thus German Botanist Leonhart Fuchs illustrated them as Indian or Calicut peppers in 1543. Many sources began calling them Indian peppers, maintaining the common belief they were of Eastern origin. The Portuguese probably introduced them to Africa and India and soon after peppers reached East Asia. They were thus called Guinea peppers, with the idea being they originated in the Guinea region of Africa. By the end of the 16th century, capsicums had already gone around the world. Peppers diffused across a wide array of cultures and geographies and were selected and/or hybridized for various characteristics, like for paprika in Hungary and Spain

What makes a Chili Pepper hot

We all know that some peppers are hotter than others. Bell peppers and banana peppers are called sweet peppers. Jalapenos and various other peppers are called hot peppers. The compound that makes peppers hot is capsaicin. The amount of capsaicin in the pepper governs how hot we perceive it to be.

The heat felt when a pepper is consumed is measured by the Scoville scale. Bell peppers are a zero on the Scoville scale. Pure capsaicin is 16,000,000 or more. It is so hot and burns so bad it is used in the pepper spray police spray in the face of criminals to subdue them.

If you like the taste of hot peppers, then you know that the jalapeno, at 2,500-5,000 Scoville units, is only the beginning. Thai peppers are very hot, at 100,000-350,000 units, as are Scotch bonnet peppers. Habanero peppers used to be considered the hottest pepper in the world, at 200,000-300,000 Scoville units. Recently, however, a pepper was found in

India that is now called the Naga Jolakia; this pepper measures 1,359,000 Scoville units.

You will notice that all of these measurements give a wide range of heat level. That is because the growing conditions can have a major effect on the capsaicin level of the pepper. Drought concentrates the levels so the peppers are hotter. Very wet conditions tend to dilute the capsaicin levels. This effect is not precise enough to tell you how much to water a given pepper to obtain a given heat level. It does exist, however, so be aware of the water the plant is getting and the probable effect on the heat level.

When you grow hot peppers and sweet peppers, it is best not to plant them right next to each other. They can cross pollinate and the sweet peppers will become hot. Put them at opposite corners of the garden, like children who do not get along, and everyone will be much happier. Also, be sure to either wear gloves to pick the hot peppers or wash your hands with soap afterwards, as the capsaicin will rub off onto your skin and when you rub your eyes, you will be sorry. It is best to pick hot peppers all by themselves, do not pick a handful of hot peppers and a handful of other fruit or vegetables as the heat of the hot pepper will rub off on them.

Chilies are native to South America, where people have been cultivating and trading them for at least 6,000 years. Linda Perry, a postdoctoral fellow in archaeobiology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, has identified microfossils of the starch grains found in chilies on grinding stones and cooking pots unearthed in the Caribbean, Venezuela and the Andes. In a paper published in Science last February, she and fellow researchers found that domesticated chilies were being eaten in southern Ecuador some 6,250 years ago. Because there are no wild chilies in southern Ecuador, domesticated plants must have been brought there from elsewhere, perhaps from Peru or Bolivia where, according to Perry and other scientists, chilies were probably first grown by humans. For whatever reason, a lot of people really liked them, Perry says. Once they were domesticated, they spread very quickly around South America and into Central America.