Chilli Con Carne

On the beef: 350g minced beef for four people is lean by chilli standards — this isn't a dish built on rendered fat the way a ragù is, it's built on the sauce doing the heavy lifting. Fry it hard and fast over high heat, not because searing "locks in juices" (it doesn't — that's an old kitchen myth that survives because browning really does taste good, just not for the reason people think) but because browning is the Maillard reaction: sugars and proteins at the meat's surface rearranging into hundreds of new flavour compounds that a gentle simmer alone would never produce. Breaking the lumps up as it browns matters for a plainer reason — a clump of mince insulates its own centre and stays grey and raw inside while the outside scorches.

On the tomatoes, two kinds doing two jobs. Tinned chopped tomato gives you bulk and acidity and liquid to simmer in; it's cheap, consistent, picked and tinned at ripeness, which is more than most fresh supermarket tomatoes in a British winter can claim. Sun-dried tomato adds concentrated, almost caramelised sweetness without adding more liquid — it's doing the job a long, slow reduction would do if you had three hours instead of thirty minutes. If you've no sun-dried tomato, a spoon of tomato purée fried briefly in the pan before the stock goes in gets you most of the way there; the point is concentration, not the specific jar.

On the spices: cumin, cinnamon, ground coriander and chilli flakes is a Tex-Mex spice logic more than an authentic-to-anywhere one — this dish is itself an American invention built from Mexican ingredients and cowboy practicality, not a dish with a single ancestral home to be loyal to. So treat the mix as a direction, not a law. No cinnamon in the cupboard — leave it out rather than reaching for nutmeg or allspice as a swap; it changes the character more than people expect for such a small quantity.

On the beans and the heat: tinned kidney beans, drained and rinsed, mostly because the canning liquid is starchy and a little metallic-tasting, and rinsing keeps your sauce from turning cloudy and tasting of tin. They go in late, near the end, because beans are already cooked — more time in the pot only breaks their skins and turns them to mush, and a bean that's lost its shape has lost its job, which is to give the sauce texture against the soft beef.

Any neutral oil with no smell of its own works for the first step — sunflower, vegetable, a mild rapeseed. Olive oil is specified here and it's fine, but a fruity extra virgin is wasted on spice-blooming; save that bottle for drizzling on something raw, where you'll actually taste it.

On serving in a British flat: tortilla chips, rice, crème fraîche, grated mature cheddar and fresh coriander are the usual spread, and cheddar melted under a grill does the job nacho cheese does elsewhere — Britain has cheddar in every fridge, so that's what goes on top, no need to hunt down Monterey Jack. If you're baking it with cheese, do that in whatever oven dish you've got; a wide frying pan with an ovenproof handle saves you washing up a second dish, which on a Sunday already given over to a roast is not nothing.