• Recipes
• Second course
• Roast
• Progressive roasted wheat white chili

Roasting

Once upon a time, one of Montana'€™s largest wheat growers and millers operated a restaurant across the street from a cookware store where I taught classes. They served an array of great big sandwiches, soups, salads, and their signature wheat chili. It was vegetarian, and made with wheat berries, tomato-based with, I believe, kidney beans. One woman in particular with whom I worked loved it, praised it to the skies, closed her eyes as her head sank backward with the first couple of fragrant, steaming bites. “I just love this,” she intoned every single time she brought back a styrofoam cup of it. <br /> <br />I had to try it. Since I cannot eat anything out of styrofoam in any shape, I ordered a cup and sat down then and there with a book for a delicious bit of silent time away from the store. I took my first eye-closing, head-tilting bite. <br /> <br />My eyes popped and my jaw dropped. Bitter, extremely bitter. The cumin, and there was a hell of a lot of it, had been over-toasted. The wheat berries, the supposed star of the show, had simply been tossed into the pot and cooked in the available liquid. I stuck my spoon in the center of the cup, and I swear to you it stood up straight as a stick. It wasn’t chili; it was mortar. Okay, I can adopt the restaurant critic’s approach and give a place three tries. The second time yielded the same results. I suspected that a third would not be a charm. <br /> <br />Clearly, it was a work in progress. The missing ingredient was progress. <br /> <br />Moving on, I kept the vegetarian concept. The boiled-within wheat berries alone focused too much attention on an ingredient that was more texture than flavor, and waaaaaay too much texture at that. Oven-roasting them punches up their flavor before simmering them separately in some vegetable stock in advance of adding them and their stock to the mix. While the wheat was roasting, I built a hardwood charcoal fire. I used it to sear the chile and tomatillos, then tossed some alder chips on the coals and tamped down the drafts to kiss them with a touch of smoky flavor. And I didn’t over-toast the cumin. <br />

Share: