Tailgating In The Living Room: Chili With Biscuits and Beer

This weekly series is about what's good to eat and drink while watching MMA with your friends. Or by yourself. I won't judge. It's gonna be a fat kid's dream.

Let's start with a fundamental equation: meat + beer = chili. There's something special about sitting down in front of the TV to watch a fight, with a bowl of hot spicy chili and a couple bottles of good beer. But what chili and what beer?

1. biscuits
2. sirloin
3. ancho chili peppers (dried).

Biscuits are awesome. They're fun to make. You mix flour and baking powder and vegetable shortening and milk and sugar and cream of tartar, and then you squeeze all that goodness together with your hands, which get all white, and like magic, you've got dough. Then you use a glass to cut the dough into little circles. When you bake those circles at 450 degrees for 20 minutes, you get golden brown deliciousness.

The way I make this recipe (modified from one found in Jane and Michael Stern's excellent Chili Nation) the biscuits form the bottom layer of the chili. It's essentially an open-faced chili sandwich. Every time you take a bite, you're going to scoop up a biscuit with meat and chili peppers piled on top. And yeah, it tastes as good as that sounds.

Sirloin is a good meat for chili. It's healthy, especially if you buy grass-fed beef, and has a good chewy texture, as opposed to the mushy ground beef found in most chili.

But the anchos. These are the key ingredient. So good: a little fire, with a little sweetness thrown in. These are, therefore, my go-to chile peppers.

Now a great chili deserves to be accompanied by a great beer. Luckily, we're living in the midst of a craft beer golden age in America. Victory, Sweetwater, Dogfish Head, Stoudt's, Fat Tire, Rogue, Weyerbacher, Russian River, Sierra Nevada, Great Lakes, and so many more: great American breweries are legion. Each of them make many fine beers. But for this chili, I suggest the Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA. This is a truly excellent beer, and its slight sweetness complements the spice of the chili.

Sirloin Chili With Biscuits

8 dried ancho chiles

1 and 1/2 cups tomato sauce

1 cup Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA

1 chopped medium onion

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/4 cup olive oil

1 cup carrots, sliced into 1/4 inch slices

1 cup parsnips, cut into 1/4 inch slices

1 and 1/2 lbs sirloin steak

1 and 1/2 teaspoons salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

2 cups flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

2 tablespoons sugar

1/2 cup solid vegetable shortening

2/3 to 3/4 cup milk

1. Boil some water. Put the dried anchos in the water, cover, and let stand for 30 minutes.

2. Seed and stem the chiles.

3. In a blender (Vita-Mix is the best.) puree the chiles with 1 cup of the tomato sauce and 1 cup of beer.

4. Drink the rest of the bottle of beer.

5. In a Dutch oven, saute the onions and garlic in the olive oil until the onions begin to soften. Add the carrots and parsnips and saute until soft. Add the beef and stir to brown it.

6. Add the pureed chile mixture to the dutch oven with the salt, pepper, cumin and Worcestershire. Simmer for 10 minutes. Stir it often and add just enough extra tomato sauce so nothing sticks to the side.

7. Leave it on low while you bake the biscuits.

8. Preheat oven to 425.

9. Mix flour, baking powder, salt, cream of tartar, and sugar in a large bowl.

10. Add shortening until mixture is crumbly.

11. Add milk and stir just enough to make a dough. Do not stir too much or dough will get tough.

12. Cover a cutting board with flour. Knead dough exactly 12 times on the board. Roll out dough about 3/4 inch thick.

13. Use floured drinking glass, 2 inches in diameter, to cut dough into circles. Combine scraps to make more biscuits and cut them into circles too. You should end up with 5 biscuits.

14. Put biscuits in a single layer on the bottom of a 2 quart casserole tray. Bake about 20 minutes, until biscuits are light brown.

15. Cover biscuits with chili.

16. Eat! Watch the fights. And drink another bottle of that 90 Minute IPA.