Beef
The Best Chili Recipe You’ve Ever Tasted
It’s an ingredient. A dish. The ultimate culinary icon. It’s decidedly regional (just try telling a Texan to serve chili over spaghetti, as they do in Cincinnati), inspiring heated debates about the proper way to prepare it. Always use ground beef. Never grind the beef—dice it. Beans in chili is heresy. If it doesn’t have beans, it’s not chili.
Well, you see the problem.
Yet most of us know a great bowl ’o red when we taste it: the meat meltingly tender, the sauce creamy-spicy, the earthy flavor of chili powder reinforced by onion, garlic, and cumin. It should bite, but not hurt, with enough heat to grab your attention. It should start with bold-flavored ingredients, but finish as a harmonious whole.
The Best Chili Recipe
You may be surprised to see the addition of bittersweet chocolate in the Raichlen chili. The combination may sound bizarre until you stop to think that the Aztecs made their hot chocolate with cocoa beans and chiles. (Montezuma allegedly consumed 50 cups a day.)
As for the chili powder, it should be pure—preferably ground from ancho chilies. Masa harina—used as an optional thickener and available at most supermarkets—is the corn flour used for making tortillas.
Everyone should know how to make chili. The following features both beef and pork, both diced meat and ground, plus plenty of chili powder, green chiles, and jalapenos to turn up the heat. Simmer it on your stove. Even better, cook it on your grill or smoker, with wood chips or chunks added to the fire to blast it with woodsmoke. Now that’s what I call chili!!
Yes, it’s complicated, but chili is supposed to be complicated.
The recipe following will, er, smoke the competition!
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