Meat – How to Cook Minced Meat Faster

I think you've got a wide berth of possibilities but what's above seems pretty restricted. What you are listing above sounds like a pretty straight-forward Midwestern American chili. It has the features of the standard chili spices, beans and tomatoes, with a nice variety of meats.

• To try to engineer a Russian chili I would expect more indigenous foods.

As @Cold suggests, beets would be great to add for their sugar content. However, there are quite a few American recipes that utilize potatoes, so you might seek those out. Are there other vegetables to substitute that you recall as more native? Other beans maybe? How about caraway, dill, chervil, tarragon?

Vodka would seem like an easy route to go to appease the indigenous aspect, but I don't think it would yield much results in terms of impacting the flavor; especially in the context of the extant chili recipe. Unfortunately, I can't see the benefit of buffeting vodka against the flavors of cumin, coriander, clove, let alone hot peppers. On the other hand, Russians produce some amazing beers (I am a big fan of Baltika), and I would recommend looking into switching to a lager flavor or Imperial Stout as I mentioned above.

But for real, my spin would be to approach this from a Solyanka point of view (which would definitely give you ceiling room to try incorporating Medovukha); or really any of the other amazing cold Russian soups. Or perhaps try to incorporate mini dumplings like Pelmani, mini Kotlety, or use Shashlyk-style prepared meats for the chili. I would also consider trying to get some lamb in the recipe, in particular at the expense of the chicken.

But don't forget, chili is all about what you want to put into it (<-- self-promotional plug); not what the standard template lists.

• The romantic version of the American myth about chili (in particular, Texas Red chili) frequently revolves around Cowboys planting peppers and onions on their most traveled roads. They would be carrying dried meats and, at night under starry skies, use kettles to cook the stew that became known as chili.
• What kind of story of Russian kindred spirit do you want to weave with your chili?

I'll often do what my mom referred to as 'planned overs', and make too large of a roast for us to eat, then turn the rest into a stew or something else in the following nights.

The only comment I really have is that if you like the 'fall apart tender', I find it more difficult to get the second time around. I recall that Alton Brown specifically cooked the meat ahead of making a stew in an episode of Good Eats, and in checking the transcript of the episode, he said it's due to the behavior of gelatin:

You can see that the meat is very, very soft. It’s almost like pulled pork in there. We’ve had complete collagen to gelatin conversion. But when this cools for an hour, and if we refrigerate it after that, we’ll see that this is going to change. More on that later.

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Now, what’s really interesting, though, is that once gelatin has reached the gel state, it takes more heat to re-dissolve it than it did to render it from collagen in the first place. And, believe it or not, that is a good thing

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Ahh, the meat is perfectly heated through, but it’s not falling apart. That’s because we let it cool down before reheating, and that is why stews, braises, fricassees, and blanquettes are always better the second day.