CHILI MAKERS AIM TO
BOWL THEM OVER AT JAMBOREE

Dave Guerin cooks for a living, but he lives to eat chili.

“I’ve always liked chili,” says Guerin, a chef for eight years at the Champagne Porch, a bar and restaurant in Spring Lake Heights. “I played around with different recipes, and over the last five years or so, fine-tuned them.”

Guerin entered his first chili competition, an event in Toms River, last spring. Although he wasn’t a winner, the raves he got from the crowd for his chili and salsa were enough to get him stoked on chili cook-offs.

“I was overwhelmed by the response,” Guerin says. “It was my first contest, and I was disappointed at not winning. I’m very competitive if I enter something.”

Guerin will get another chance on Sunday, October 13, as one of the contestants in the Chili Cook-off being held from noon to 3 p.m. during the 6th Annual Keyport Country Jamboree and Food Festival.

He should be easy to spot. Guerin’s will be the booth that’s smokin’ – literally – a display he creates with the help of dry ice and cactus plants.

When it comes to ingredients, the chef is particular. He grows his own chile peppers from seeds he orders over the Internet. Among his favorite varieties are golden habanero, Scotch bonnet, and pure African bird pepper.

He uses cubed beef, ground beef, cubed pork, or a combination of the three in his chili recipes. “I roast the cubed meat first in the oven,” says Guerin, and then he cooks it slowly with the rest of his ingredients in an uncovered pot on top of the stove.
Guerin has a few ingredients and techniques that he uses when making his “championship” chili.
“I use beer,” he says. “I pour the beer in a bowl and then add the spices to the bowl and let them soak for 15 minutes to a half hour. This allows the flavors to marry together.”

Guerin likes his chili sweet and hot. “I like to taste sweet first and get some bite at the end,” he says. For sweetening, he uses brown sugar and honey.

“Some people even put chocolate in, like the kind you find in molé sauce,” Guerin says.

Gordon Stone, a carpenter from Edison who will be competing against Guerin in Sunday’s chili cook-off, prefers using molasses as a sweetener in his chili recipe.

Stone attended the same Toms River event that Guerin had entered last spring, and says he decided right then and there, “I can do this.” He became a member of the International Chili Society shortly after. The Keyport chili cook-off will be his first competition.

“I like to cook,” says Stone, “and I make chili a lot for my family. I’m trying to experiment and refine the recipe for the contest,” he says. “It comes out a little different every time.”

Stone, a native of Georgia, says chili is just as popular there as it is in Texas. His basic chili recipe includes sirloin beef cubes, diced tomatoes, garlic, chili powder, cumin, brown sugar and molasses. His favorite special ingredient is home-canned peppers he purchased recently in Pennsylvania’s Amish country. “They come in a glass jar, they’re red and about two inches long,” says Stone, “ and they’re very hot.”

Festival organizers say it was their aim to keep the rules for the chili cook-off simple. “Some chili contest rules can get very technical,” says Kathaleen Shaw, an advocate for the Keyport Business Alliance. “We didn’t want to make things too complicated,” she says, “because we wanted to encourage people to come out for the competition. We hope to get enough varieties of chili to satisfy the whole spicy spectrum of taste buds.”

The cook-off is open to professional chefs and cooks, The entry fee is $29, and winners will be chosen by popular vote.

Festival attendees will pay $5 each to enter the tasting area, where they can sample all the entries and vote for their favorite. Cash prizes will be awarded to first and second-place winners and for the best booth. Proceeds will benefit community programs sponsored by the Keyport Business Alliance.

Additional information on the cook-off is available by calling Allen Consulting at 732-946-2711.