My Chili Recipe, With Lots of Commentary

Kelly said someone wanted my chili recipe, so I wrote it out, with lots of commentary.

What Chili Was, And What It Should Be

Chili is an historical, utilitarian dish. Its roots reach back to midwestern settlers and cattle herders who spent weeks-long stretches out on the plains of the South West. A hundred and fifty years ago, you could find the ancestral version of this dish from Colorado and middle California, down to the parts of Mexico where the desert ends and the tropical climate begins. Pretty much anywhere in North America where it’s consistently dry and hot during the day you’ll find chili.

In its original version it has three ingredients:

• Dried, salted beef (basically regular old beef jerky without the sugar we put in it today)
• Fresh and/or dried chili peppers
• Water (or, later on, coffee)

Ranchers and herders (and probably everyone else) made the dish because the ingredients were among the small handful of things you could get nearly anywhere. Beef was abundant and it was mostly salted and dried for preservation since refrigeration was a long way off. And chilis were about as common there as dandelions in an unkept yard.

Since dentistry was in about the same state then as refrigeration was, you’d have lost at least handful of teeth by your thirties, and while the leathery beef might have been a tolerable, slow-chewing snack, it wouldn’t have made for a very satisfying meal. So if you were settling down for the night, you’d pour some water in your pot and throw some beef in there to hydrate and soften up over the fire.

But beef and water and salt probably felt like a kind of sad meal even then. Beef can be flavorful, but the flavor resides mostly in the fat, and dried beef has almost all the fat cut out of it because fat goes rancid even when its dried. So you’d naturally keep an eye out during the day for anything else you might could throw into the pot to add some variety, nutrition, and fiber.

Depending on the area you might have access to yucca or some edible leafy greens, but probably the most common edible plant with any substance growing in the drier areas would have been peppers, and everyone would have been familiar with them as an ingredient because, like beef, they’re abundant and pretty edible when they’re dried, and can be rehydrated to add some flavor and substance to meals.

This is how chili was born, and it’s a fun little historical cooking experiment to make the original version: You just cut some thin strips of a cheap, lean sirloin roast and dry it out in a dehydrator or in an oven at 200F for a few hours. Then you take some dry and maybe also fresh chilis — anaheims, Guajillos, arobols, chipotles, negros, anchos, pasillas, mulatos all work and would have defined the different regional varieties of the dish — and throw them and the beef into a pot, cover it with water, and simmer for half an hour or so. Add extra salt because their dried beef would usually have been pretty **salty.

The chilis and beef will soften, expand, and break up as you simmer and stir, creating a very dark red or black stew. It will taste very disappointing and, depending on the varieties and amounts of chilis you used, uncomfortably hot.

So that’s the original version — just chilis and beef and water. Not ground beef. Not chili powder. Definitely no beans or tomatoes. Contrary to how most historic regional cuisine is threated, this is not a dish where you want to strive for authenticity. To the degree that you do, it will taste like something a very tired, toothless cattle herder with no access to a grocery store made over a fire, which is exactly what the authentic version is.

So, we have to say screw authenticity here, and just take the original idea — a beef stew spiced with chilis — and make it delicious by adding whatever makes sense. Everyone’s tastes in that regard differ, and there are probably a hundred or more ingredients that could sensibly go in a spicy beef stew, and this is why there’s way more variation in chili recipes than in chocolate chip cookies or mac and cheese or hamburgers.

So what you’re getting here is just my preferred way of turning the original recipe into something good.

I like my chili:

• hearty
• spicy
• savory
• sweet (but not sugary)
• a bit funky
• a bit acidic
• a bit bitter

So, I use following ingredients:

• Beef: both ground beef and chunks of something lean (for heartiness and a variety of texture)
• Beef broth (for savoriness)
• Chilis: dried ancho, arobol, annaheim, and new mexicos, and a fresh bell pepper (for smokiness and sweetness); some cayenne powder and a maybe a fresh jalapeno (for heat), (The dried chilis aren’t hard to find; you can buy bags of them dried at walmart in the mexican food section.)
• Onions: lots of them, more than seems reasonable, and of however many varieties the store has; in one pot of chili I put at least five onions (for sweetness and funk)
• Garlic (for funk)
• Tomatos and tomato paste: I use canned, whole tomatoes because the chopped and crushed varieties have calcium chloride in them to keep them firm, and you don’t want that firmness or the taste (for acidity)
• Unsweetened chocolate or brewed coffee (for a bit of bitterness and the hearty, robust, rounded flavors that coffee and chocolate have when they’re mellowed out and mixed in with other things)
• Lime juice or cider vinegar (for acidity)

I used to put beans and a grated carrot in my chili, and I still think those are delicious, but I switched to the Keto diet, and those add too many carbs. I don’t think the stew needs them really anyway. If you really like beans in yours my advice is to not use dried beans. It’s tempting to think that they’ll be higher quality, and they may be, but they will take a whole day to cook to the silky texture you want out of them, and you will either give up before they’re done, throw the half-cooked beans in and ruin the dish, or be mad as hell and starving by the time they’re actually done cooking. Just used canned black, pinto, or kidney beans (or a mix) and do not drain them. The liquid (called agua faba) is delicious and helps thicken the stew.

Ingredients:

• 2lb of some kind of beef roast
• 1lb of ground beef
• 1 or 2 large cans of whole tomatoes depending on your taste (make sure there’s no basil or other herbs in it). If you want to go right in the middle, use 3 small cans.
• 5 large onions: can be all the same or a mix of whatever you like — red, vidallia, white, yellow,
• 1 large green bell pepper
• 1 large jalapeno (optional)
• 5–10 large dried chilis of whatever not-very-spicy variety you can find. Guajillo, Negros, Mulatos, Cascabel, Ancho, and Pasilla are all good. Chipotles are fine too but a bit spicier so use fewer of those. You can also just use like a full cup (literally 1c) of chili powder instead, if you don’t want to bother with dried chilis but it won’t be as good, and you should make absolutely sure the chili powder doesn’t contain salt or the stew will be inedibly salty.
• 4c beef broth (the brand Imagine is my favorite — bullion also works)
• 4 garlic cloves
• ½–2 teaspoons Cayenne powder
• 1–2 tablespoons Cumin powder
• ⅓ bar of unsweet baker’s chocolate and/or 1c normal drip coffee
• salt
• water
• vegetable oil (coconut if you’re on keto)

Directions:

Here’s what to do with the ingredients once you’ve gotten them together:

1. First divide your onions like this: Set one large onion (a white one if you have it) aside. Take the rest and divide them into to two roughly equal piles. One of the piles you’ll end up dicing and sauteeing, and the other you’ll blend
2. Gather that single onion, the bell pepper, the jalapeno or other fresh chilis if you’re using them. Cut the onion in half. Put a single layer of tinfoil on a skillet (cast iron if you have it), and turn the skillet up to about 75% as high as it will go. Then put the onion on the foil-clad skillet flat sides down, along with the bell pepper and any other fresh chilis you’re using. And then walk away. Maybe open a window. If your skillet is a bit greasy it will smoke some but that’s okay. Leave the veggies on there until the skin touching the skillet has charred and turned black. You’ll be tempted to worry about the onion and baby it, but don’t. Once the contact surface of the onion has charred it won’t burn through. I’ve left an onion on a screaming hot skillet for over an hour and it never burned through or caught fire. Once you’ve got a mostly black side, rotate the veggies and get them well-charred on as many sides as you can. This will add some of the smoky flavor you’d get from cooking over a campfire, without having to do all the work.
3. Next, you’re basically going to make a salsa. Grab the one large or three small cans of whole tomatoes, the charred onions and chilis, the garlic, the lime or vinegar, and one of the two piles of onions. Cut everything into quarters and put them in a blender with some salt and a few glugs of lime juice or vinegar. Blend until they’re as smooth as you can get them. You now have a delicious salsa. Eat some with chips if you want, but save most of it.
4. Take the other pile of the onions and dice them into ¼ inch squares. These will add textural variety.
5. Cut your beef roast into cubes and salt them liberally. Put them in a hot pot or skillet with some oil and cook them until they’ve got some char on all sides. Steaks should be served medium-rare, but here you’re going for well-done. When you’re done, throw the ground beef in with a good amount of salt and brown it hard. Reserve the fat in the pan when you’re done.
6. Set aside the cooked beef and throw the diced onions in with salt and about ¼ cup of water. First, the water will boil and evenly cook all the onions until they’re all translucent. Once the water has cooked away, you’ll have onions and fat left. Turn the heat down to 6 or so and continue cooking the onions, stirring whenever you feel anxious, until they’re almost the color of pecans (without the shell). When they’re done, throw the cayenne pepper and cumin in and stir it around quickly for thirty seconds, then take it all out and throw them in the container you put the beef in. If at any point the onions get too dry and start to burn, throw a bit of water in and bump the heat down a bit. Water will always stop them from burning.
7. Take the peppers and onions you pureed and pour them in the pot you took the onions out of and cook it on 6 or so. Bring it to a simmer and let it do that for twenty minutes. You want the weird metallic taste of the canned tomatoes to cook away (it always vanishes after a few minutes over heat), and the raw bite of the onion and garlic to mellow out, and the smoky flavor of the charred veggies to permeate the mix. Stir it and sniff it every few minutes. It’ll reduce a bit. When you taste it and it no longer has any of that raw flavor, you’re good.
8. Finally, put the caramelized onions and the beef into the pot with the cooked salsa. Pour in the four or so cups of beef broth. And add the ⅓ bar of bakers chocolate or 1 cup of regular brewed coffee. Stir and bring it all to a simmer and let it cook it until it reduces to the thickness that you like in your chili. Taste it occasionally and add whatever you think it needs — salt, more cayenne for heat, whatever.

Now you have chili.

Notes:

If you make it too hot there’s only two options:

1. Dilute it, but not with liquid. The liquid is going to reduce in the end so the stew is nice and thick. So you need to dilute it with more of the non-spicy solid ingredients. Puree more onion and tomato and pour it in.
2. Eat spicy chili like your ancestors did. Learn to love it. Make them proud.

Sometimes I like to reserve some of the whole tomatoes, cut them up, and add them at the end at step 8 so I get some little tender acidic chunks along with the pieces of caramelized onion.

If you feel like your chili is missing sweetness do not add sugar. Sugar is fine but for some reason, in this dish, it doesn’t provide the subtle sweetness you’re after; it just makes it taste like you put sugar in your chili. Instead, grate or blend a carrot or two and add them. There’s a surprising amount of sweetness in raw carrots, and it’s a nice vegetal sweetness, not the cloying, candy-like sweetness that white sugar provides.

You might be skeptical about the chocolate and/or coffee, but, really, give it a try. People tend to think that they don’t like bitter tastes, but chocolate is bitter and it’s most people’s favorite dessert, and coffee is bitter and it’s the world’s most popular drink. A bit of bitterness provides a contrast that makes all the other flavors — the savory, the acidic, the salty, the sweet — stand out and speak more fully. Use bitterness the way you use salt. You don’t want your food to taste salty. The salt just enhances the other flavors. Bitterness does the exact same thing.

Variations, Good and Bad:

My absolute favorite way to eat this chili is with a Jiffy cornbread muffin and a spoonful of goat cheese. Cut the muffin into halves vertically, and put them in a bowl. Pour the chili over it, and top it with a tablespoon of goat cheese and several dashes of some cheap, vinegary hot sauce like texas pete (never tabasco though). The cheese will soften and disperse like sour cream as you stir, and the sweetness and slight crunch of the muffin with the chili is something special.

One of my favorite ingredients to thicken dark stews and add a bit of richness and a hint of fruitiness is prunes. Sometimes I’ll chop four or five of them up real fine and throw them in about halfway through cooking the diced onions. It’s another ingredient that you’d think would be awful, but after you try it you’ll start to keep prunes stocked.

Things that I’ve seen people put in chili that don’t really work:

• Corn
• Mushrooms
• Squash
• Chicken
• Bacon
• Sharp cheese
• Maple syrup
• Honey
• Shallots
• Avocado
• Beef liver or kidney

Things I’ve had in chili that worked really (sometimes surprisingly) well:

• Wine (Red or white is fine. Go for something fruity and gulpable like merlot or a table blend, nothing too bold or tannic like cabernet, or very oaky like chardonnay, or too dry like dry riesling).
• Beer (lager or porter, no IPA or other hoppy beers)
• Corn meal (to thicken)
• Banana
• Raisins
• Sumac
• Beef heart or tongue

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