Smoked Turkey White Chili
I may be officially done with turkey for Thanksgiving, at least in the traditional sense. Last year I ditched the bird in favor a pork belly porchetta and almost everyone was happier. Also, a lot of my turkey recipes on this site revolved around using up leftovers because I always had a lot of them and I rarely want to eat reheated turkey on its own. Don't barbecue turkey sandwiches, turkey potato skins, turkey empanadas, and turkey paninis all sound a lot better in comparison? Well, I have at least more to add to that before I throw in the turkey towel—smoked turkey white chili.
I'm not a bean chili guy, and there's evidence of that since beans make no appearance in any chili recipe on this site, that is until today. I had never had white chili before and as I began to research recipes, I didn't even realize it's heavily green chili based, but pureeing beans at the end is what gives the chili its much lighter hue. When I do work with beans, I have a preference for starting with dried, which need to be soaked overnight in salt water to reconstitute them enough to cook well the next day.
This recipe was conceived as a use for leftover turkey, but I made it outside of the context of the holiday, so I had to purposefully smoke a bird. I choose to select only turkey thighs for this since they are much juicier and flavorful than breast meat, but they can be a challenge to procure. I ended up needing to make a special trip to Wegman's to get mine, but they were well stocked and I was able to get enough thighs to make chili for 20 people. If I wasn't able to find thighs, I was ready to switch to legs, which were very easy to find.
If you don't have leftover turkey and are smoking your own, you can prepare a lot of this recipe while the thighs smoke. The next step is charring up poblano, Anaheim, and jalapeño peppers, which I did over a blazing hot fresh batch of coals. At the same time those charred, I also grilled some onions and garlic too.
While this recipe utilizes the smoker and grill for these initial steps, and that does maximizes flavor, you can certainly move these things indoors. The peppers, onions, and garlic all still need to be charred, but it can also be done over the flame of a gas range, or under a broiler. The turkey too can be cooked in the chili liquid while the beans cook. It won't be smoked, obviously, but the end chili is so flavorful that you probably won't miss it.
Once the peppers were done, they were cooled in a covered bowl, after which I removed the skins, stems, and seeds and placed them in the jar of a blender. To that I added the charred onion and garlic, which I peeled first. I gave those all a spin with a little water in order for it to puree more easily and effectively.
Next I toasted some cumin, coriander, and oregano in butter before adding in the chili puree, beans, and chicken stock and bringing that to a boil. Then after reducing the heat, it was just a waiting game until the beans were consistently tender each time I taste tested.
This is when you could put the turkey in the chili and simmer it until it reaches 165°F, or if you're smoking the turkey, during this simmering time is when the thighs will be done since they take about an hour and half to cook in the low 225°F heat. Once the turkey is done, it needs to be rested until cool enough to handle because the meat needs to pulled for use in the final chili.
Once the beans were fully tender, I took a couple cups of them, including the cooking liquid, and pureed that in the blender until completely smooth. Then it went back into the chili and with a little stirring, the very green chili's hue lessoned a bit, but I wouldn't have called it white quite yet.
Two more additions helped get the color to a lighter shade. The first was heavy cream, which is fairly standard ingredient in white chilis. The second was pepper jack cheese. I picked this one up from Kenji's white chili and is something I never thought to do before. Not only did it improve the flavor and color, but it also thickened up chili a bit more as well. I added the cheese in a little bit at a time and stopped when it felt right to me, which was a lot less cheese than Kenji's recipe calls for—I didn't want to go overboard and have the chili taste like a cheese sauce.
Now this chili was tasting incredibly good and looking great as well. Things just got better with the additions of lime juice, cilantro, and the turkey.
This white chili makes a good argument for having leftover Thanksgiving turkey to use up because this stuff was pretty great. I love big flavors, so it felt a bit counterintuitive to lessen the strong pepper flavors of a green chili, but they weren't so much diminished here, but rather played in a more nuanced manner that made the spices and other components more noticeable. That did make the turkey stick out though with its smokey character, and while I probably would have enjoyed a non-smoked bird more in this context, my guests ate it up. I filled my giant slow cooker with this chili at the start of the afternoon and had very little left by the end the day, something I wasn't expecting. I also made a vegetarian version where I subbed out the chicken stock for vegetable stock and added in corn and chopped chickpeas instead of turkey, and that was a hit as well. I'll probably be sticking with a turkey-less Thanksgiving for a bit, but I wouldn't mind having this chili in my life more often, so it'll probably make a repeat appearance sooner than a whole roasted holiday bird.
