The Food Lab: How To Make The Best Chili Ever
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Clockwise from left: three dried chiles, a finished bowl of chili, the effect of salt on beans [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
The Best Chili Ever
Two days in the kitchen never tasted so good. Get the recipe here »
I gotta admit up front: the title of this article is somewhat misleading. Yes, we will discuss chili, and yes, it's the best chili I personally have ever made.
But! to call something "The Best Chili Ever" implies that the recipe is perfect, and perfection implies that there is no room for improvement. I can only hope that others will continue perfecting the chili work that began on the Tex-Mex border and that I continue testing well after the last rich and spicy remnant is licked clean off the bottom of the bowl. With that disclaimer out of the way, lets move on to the testing.
My first step was to set up some parameters that would define the ultimate chili. Certainly, there are disputes in the chili world as to what makes the best. Ground beef or chunks? Are tomatoes allowed? Should we even mention beans? But discounting a few people (who are most likely either from strange places like Cincinnati or Japan), I think we can all agree on a few things.
The ultimate chili should:
- Have a rich, complex chile flavor (for the sake of clarity, I will spell the dish "chili", and the fruit "chile" for the remainder of the article) that combines sweet, bitter, hot, fresh, and fruity elements in balance.
- Have a robust, meaty, beefy flavor.
- Assuming that it contains beans, have beans that are tender, creamy, and intact.
- Be bound together by a thick, deep red sauce.
To achieve these goals, I decided to break down the chili into its distinct elements—the chiles, the beef, the beans, and the flavorings—perfecting each one before putting them all together in one big happy pot.
The Chiles
I have bad memories of my chili-eating college days—when chili was made by adding a can of beans and a can of tomatoes to ground beef, then adding one of every spice on the rack (and two of cumin) then simmering. The finished product inevitably had a totally unbalanced flavor with a powdery, gritty mouthfeel from the dried spices.
My first goal was to ditch the pre-powdered spices and pre-mixed chile powders (which are at worst inedible, and at best inconsistent) and go straight for the source: real dried chiles.
They come in a baffling array, and to make my selection easier, I decided to taste every variety of whole chiles I could find—both powdered in a spice grinder, and pureed in a blender with water—taking note of both their spice level, and their flavor profile. I noticed that most of them fell into one of four distinct categories:
- Sweet and fresh: These peppers have distinct aromas reminiscent of red bell peppers and fresh tomatoes. They include: Costeño, New Mexico (aka dried Anaheim, California, or Colorado), and Choricero.
- Hot: An overwhelming heat. The best, like Cascabels also have some complexity, while others like the Pequin or Arbol, are all heat, and not much else.
- Smoky: Some chile peppers, like Chilpotles (dried, smoked jalapeños), are smoky because of the way they are dried. Others, like Ñora or Guajillo have a natural musty, charred wood, smokiness.
- Rich and Fruity: Distinct aromas of sun-dried tomatoes, raisins, chocolate, and coffee. Some of the best-known Mexican chiles, like Ancho, Mulato, and Pasilla, are in this category.
Just like I occasionally like to mix up my Beatles Rock Band with a bit of Super Mario or old-school Street Fighter II, variety is what keeps you coming back to the chili pot.
The best spice strategy: Cover the low notes with a chile from the rich and fruity category, the high notes with a chile from the sweet and fresh and add a hit of heat with one from the hot, giving the smokier chiles a miss for reasons purely of personal taste. Unless you're camping or cooking it in a Dutch, there's no room in chili for smokiness.
Eliminating the gritty texture of powdered chile: Ditch the powder, toast the chiles whole to enhance their aroma, cook them down in stock, and puree them until completely smooth, creating a rich, concentrated flavor base for my chili.
Pureed chiles.
The Meat
Asides from beans, the meat is the biggest source of contention amongst chili lovers. Some insist on ground beef (like my lovely wife), while others prefer larger, stew-like chunks (like myself). Regular Food Lab readers may have noticed that more often than not, I begrudgingly let my wife have her way.
This time, I was determined to fight for my own rights or at the very least, make her compromise her chili convictions.
Ground chuck, a chuck roast, and bone-in short ribs
After trying store-ground beef, home-ground beef, beef cut into 1-inch chunks, and beef roughly chopped by hand into a textured mix of 1/8-inch to 1/2-inch pieces, the last method won out. It provided little bits or nearly-ground-beef that added body and helped keep the stew (and my marriage) well bound, while still providing enough large, chunkier pieces to provide textural interest and something for a real man (like myself) to bite on.
I decided to go with bone-in short ribs—my favorite cut of beef for braising—hoping that I'd be able to use the bones to add extra flavor and body to my chili later on.
Browning Issues
Ground beef stewing in its own juices, and chunks of perfectly browned beef.
As anyone who's ever made a bolognese knows, it's nearly impossible to properly brown a pot of ground beef. It's a simple matter of surface area to volume ratio. Ground beef has tons of surface area for liquid and fat to escape.
As soon as you start cooking it, liquid starts pooling in the bottom of the pot, completely submerging the meat and leaving it to gurgle and stew in its own gray-brown juices. Only after these juices have evaporated can any browning take place. The sad truth? With ground (or in our case, finely chopped) beef, you either have to settle for dry, gritty meat, or no browned flavor.
Then I had a thought: why was I bothering trying to brown the beef after I chopped it? If browned flavor in the stew was what I was after, does it even matter when I brown the beef as long as it ends up getting browned?
I grabbed another batch of short ribs, this time searing them in a hot pan before removing the meat from the bone and chopping it down to its final size.
The result? Chili with chopped beef texture, but deeply browned flavor.
The Beans
If you are from Texas, you may as well skip to the next section. But if you're like me and believe beans are as integral, if not more so, than the beef to a great bowl of chili, read on.
To be honest, there's nothing wrong with canned kidney beans in a chili. They are uniformly cooked, hold their shape well, and—at least in chili—the relative lack of flavor in canned vs. dried beans is not an issue. There are enough other flavors going on to compensate.
But, sometimes the urge to crack some culinary skulls and the desire for some food-science myth-busting is so strong that I can't resist. So we're going to have a quick diversion into the land of dried beans.
If you have a chef (as boss, that is, not personal), a grandmother from Tuscany, or an aunt from Toulouse, you may have at one point been told never to add salt to your beans until they are completely cooked, lest you prevent their tough skins from softening fully. In fact, in some restaurant I worked in, it was thought that overcooked beans could actually be saved by salting the water (I assure you, whatever firmness reattained was purely psychosomatic in nature*).
*I know, I know, that's what she said.
But how often have you actually cooked two batches of beans side by side, one soaked and cooked in salted water, and the other soaked and cooked in plain water? Chances are, never. And now, you never will. I present to you the results of just such a test:
Both batches of beans were cooked just until they were fully softened, with none of the papery toughness of an undercooked skin (about 2 hours for both batches, after an overnight soak). As you can clearly see, the unsalted beans end up absorbing too much water and blowing out long before their skins properly soften, while the salted beans remain fully intact.
The problem? Magnesium and calcium, two ions found in bean skins that act kind of like buttresses, supporting the skins' cell structure and keeping them firm. By soaking beans in salted water overnight, some of the sodium ions end up playing musical chairs with the calcium and magnesium, leaving you with skins that soften at the same rate as the beans' interiors.
So where does the old myth come from? Probably the same place most culinary myths come from: grandmothers, aunts, and chefs. Never trusted 'em, never will.
Spices
The chili-standard duo of cumin and coriander were a given, as were a couple of cloves, their medicinal, mouth-numbing quality a perfect balance for the spicy heat of the chiles, much like numbing Sichuan peppers can play off chiles in the Chinese flavor combination known as ma-la (numb-hot).
I also decided to give star anise a try, in a nod to Heston Blumenthal and his treatment of Bolognese sauce. (He found that in moderation it can boost the flavor of browned meats without making its anise-like presence known. He's right, as I quickly discovered.)
As for toasting, I made sure to toast the spices before grinding them, in line with an experiment I performed while at Cook's Illustrated, where we compared spices that were ground then toasted, against spices that were toasted, then ground.
The toasted-then-ground trumped for flavor in every test. Why? Toasting heats the volatile flavor compounds in the spices' cells, causing them to change shape, recombine, and form new, more complex aromas.
If you toast post-grinding, these volatile aromas are too exposed to the air. They can easily leap right out of the spices and dissipate, leaving you with more aroma around your kitchen while you cook, but less aroma around your food when you serve it.
With the spices accounted for, the last thing was working on a cooking method. Aside from pureeing the chiles and browning the short, I saw no reason to stray far from tradition.
I sauteed onions, garlic, and oregano in rendered beef fat (along with some fresh Thai chiles for added heat and freshness), cooked down the chile puree, deglazed with some chicken stock (I tried a bit of beer, but found the flavor too distracting), added the beef and their bones, and the soaked beans along with some tomatoes, a simmered it all until it was done.
So how'd it taste? Great. But not that great.
Dessert Chili?
So how could I add complexity? If my chiles already had distinct aromas of coffee and chocolate, could there be any harm in adding real coffee and chocolate to play up those flavors? After all, chocolate is a common ingredient in many true south-of-the-border chile blends (like mole Negro) and coffee is commonly used as a bitter flavor enhancer in sweet and savory dishes alike.
I made a new batch incorporating one ounce of unsweetened chocolate and a tablespoon of finely ground, dark roast espresso beans to my chile puree, instantly bumping up its complexity and bitterness. Although chocolate aromas were readily detectable during the first few minutes of cooking, the scent quickly dissipated, providing subtlety as the chili cooked.
Almost there. The only thing remaining was to address meatiness.
Rounding up the Usual Suspects: Umami Bombs
In the last few months, ever since I started my experimentation with turkey burgers, the only things I've kept closer by my side than my meat grinder and my wife are my jars of Marmite, soy sauce, and anchovies.
Three umami-bombs that can increase the meatiness of nearly any dish involving ground meat and/or stews. Adding a dab of each to my chili puree boosted my already-beefy short ribs to the farthest reaches of meatiness, a realm where seared skinless cows traipse across hills of ground beef, darting in and out of fields of skirt steak, stopping only to take sips of rivers overflowing with thick glace de viande...
Convinced that I had finally reached the pinnacle of my chili-centric existence, I ladled up a bowl for myself, noting the perfectly intact, creamy beans, the good mix of finely chopped beef and robust beef chunks, and the deep red sauce.
Inhaling deeply, I stopped and suddenly thought of penne alla vodka, the once ubiquitous dish that enjoyed a brief moment of stardom in the 1980s—when all the red sauce joints decided they wanted to be pink sauce joints—before realizing that the 1990s don't like pink.
Why did this mysteriously enter my head at such a critical moment of introspection? It all has to do with something called an azeotrope.
It's a curious fact that although water boils at 100°C (212°F), and alcohol boils at 78.5°C (173°F), a mixture of alcohol and water will boil at a lower temperature than either pure alcohol or water on its own.
You see, alcohol and water are a bit moleculist (the molecular equivalent of a racist), but only a bit, meaning they stick with their own kind just a bit tighter than with each other. So, when the water and alcohol are mixed, an individual water molecule is further away from other water molecules, making it much easier for it to escape and vaporize. Likewise for the alcohol.
So what's this got to do with chili?
All of this aroma-building serves no purpose whatsoever unless those aromas reach your nose, right? So after cooking the chili, my goal should be to get as much of the aroma out of the bowl, and into the air as possible.
I reasoned that by adding a couple shots of hard liquor—say some vodka, bourbon or tequila—I'd not only help the alcohol-soluble flavor compounds in the chili reach my nose and mouth more efficiently, but because of the mixture's azeotropic nature, I'd actually help the water-soluble compounds vaporize more efficiently as well.
It worked like a charm, and after a thorough tasting of vodka, scotch, bourbon, and tequila, in the name of good science, I came to the conclusion that they're all good.
Long Island Iced Chili, anyone?
This may all seem long and tedious to do in one shot, and I admit: even I sometimes prefer doing things the short, easy, and less flavorful way, but the beauty of multi-step recipes is that even if you only change one thing in your routine—adding chocolate and coffee to your mix, grinding spices after toasting instead of before—the end results should be better, and isn't better food what it's all about?
Continue here for The Best Chili Ever »
About the author: After graduating from MIT, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt spent many years as a chef, recipe developer, writer, and editor in Boston. He now lives in New York with his wife, where he runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and co-writes the blog GoodEater.org about sustainable food enjoyment.
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80 Comments:
I really wish I could favorite this! =(
caramel at 7:44AM on 01/22/10
Adding beans automatically disqualifies it as the best chili ever.
OTC617 at 8:05AM on 01/22/10
Agreed, great and thorough article. The debate will rage on but I have to disagree with your second point about the ultimate chili - it must have a robust full flavor but I don't think beef is required nor meat at all. From the cook-offs I've been too the vegetarian chili usually surpasses the meaty ones. Maybe you just have to have a better chili making base to enter a veg-chili tho.
christopher at 8:19AM on 01/22/10
lol, as usual very thorough Kenji but we may have to agree to disagreee on this one. Though I agree whole heartedly on the whiskey,beer, or tequila part.
winternutt at 8:37AM on 01/22/10
No chipotles? treason!!
Looks like a great recipe otherwise.
Do you notice a difference between beans bought at the supermarket vs. beans bought in bulk from a store with turnover? I ask because recently I realized the polenta I buy in bulk is so much better than the supermarket stuff.
LauraJ at 8:51AM on 01/22/10
J.Kenji - on Cook's Country this week (I think it wasn't ATK) when they made Tuscan bean soup they tried variations on the salted and unsalted bean-cooking business, and found that the best thing to do was to salt the soaking liquid ("haha. we brine everything nowadays.") then rinse and cook without salt. (I'm pretty sure it was their beans cooked in salt that looked like your beans cooked without salt.
I'm very glad for your dried chili discussion. I confess I use chili powder because I'm bewildered by the whole panoply of choices, and I don't have a lot of choices locally and would have to order these. But I may, now.
Did you try varieties of choices for the tomatoes? That seems to have been a very minor element for you.
I'm intrigued by the addition of anise as a meaty flavor enhancement. I wonder if it would boost the meaty flavor in the veggie burger I'm trying to perfect. will try it.
lemonfair at 9:01AM on 01/22/10
caramel: For a while I had to click on favorite twice to get it to work. Just now it favorited on the first try. But since my favorites have been disappearing at the bottom of a long list of subsequent favorites I bookmark them now.
lemonfair at 9:03AM on 01/22/10
@ lemonfair - I've had good results with Alton Brown's Chili Powder chili powder
winternutt at 9:21AM on 01/22/10
I've been experimenting with pureed chiles in chilis for several years now. Sometimes I like to just use a single variety per batch. Some chiles seem to go better with pork than beef, so I use pork. If you like some tomato acidity in the chili, I find that a 5:1 ratio of chili to tomato works well. I'm interested in the meatiness, umami ideas. Does anyone else have trouble achieving the right level of salt in chilis?
krusemark at 9:43AM on 01/22/10
@lemonfair
Was it cook's country or cook's illustrated? I'm pretty sure Cook's Country doesn't have a tuscan soup recipe. But, if it's the recipe I'm thinking of (called "Hearty Tuscan Bean Stew), that soup gets cooked with both pancetta, and chicken broth, So there actually is salt in the cooking liquid.
But, you're right - the important part is making sure that there is salt in the soaking liquid. After that, you can cook in whatever you'd like. But taste the beans after the soak and before cooking them - even after rinsing, they're plenty salty, so no way you can cook them in totally salt free liquid the second day.
I do believe that salt can have an affect on the interior, making it a little mealy if there is too much of it, but that is mitigated in part by the acid from the tomatoes.
@everyone
People are passionate about chili. I'm sure that this recipe will not come close to qualifying as "the best" for everyone, hence the disclaimer at the top. I do hope there's some interesting info in it though!
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 9:46AM on 01/22/10
If you add beans to chili, it becomes beef stew and that's an entirely different category of food.
banananne at 10:10AM on 01/22/10
The tuscan bean soup recipe is from Cook's Illustrated (not CC). It happened to arrive in my mail box this morning.
This was a fantastic article! Thank you, J. Kenji Lopez. I plan on showing it to my father, who was also an MIT grad, albeit in the 1940s. My prediction is he will enjoy the azeotropic discussion.
CheesePlease at 10:28AM on 01/22/10
Great article! And very nice flavor thought process. And I am glad you eschewed ground beef and went with chopped seared short ribs. True bolognese sauce is made this way also, the braising breaking the beef down so that it falls apart into beautifully textured little strands. Ground beef does not easily allow for this and, as you mentioned, rarely ever browns. For my chili I like to try to get a little pork in there somewhere as well. But I will definitely use your chili pepper puree process in the future. Thanks!
Demian Repucci at 10:43AM on 01/22/10
If you want to use ground beef and brown it without waiting for the juice to evaporate, get out the old turkey baster and siphon the juices out and reserve to add back to the chili later. Browns the meat more quickly, lets you skim off fat if you desire, and keeps the stock flavor from the cooked meat.
Meat guy at 11:28AM on 01/22/10
Wow! terrific article, with a lot of new food science information. Now I'm inspired to rethink/rework my usual approach to chili, even if it means actual measurements instead of random and freeform.
SeattleDee at 11:33AM on 01/22/10
@SeattleDee
I think chili is one of those dishes that takes pretty well to random and freeform - measurements are helpful, but technique is far more important. The key here (like in most stews) is just slowly building and layering flavors to add depth and complexity.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 11:37AM on 01/22/10
Great article and sure to stir up a lot of controversy.
Why did you decide to use chocolate instead of cocoa powder?
And coffee beans instead of brewed coffee?
Is there a reason why you also chose not to add any cinnamon?
For sweetness, sometimes I add a tiny bit of maple syrup, too. I'm curious to try your three umami bomb formation, though!
kathryn at 11:42AM on 01/22/10
@kathryn
- I had chocolate and not cocoa powder on hand.
- I have espresso beans, but the three brewing devices I own get used so infrequently (I'm a tea or cocktail drinker) that I didn't want to pull them out, and I figured, what's the difference between coffee beans and any other toasted, ground spice anyway?
- No reason other than cinnamon always reminds me of chorizo, and didn't seem quite appropriate for chili. Or I can blame my wife. If you like it though, nothing stopping you!
Kenji
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 11:51AM on 01/22/10
I wonder also how adding 1/4 c. of jalapeno infused tequila would affect the final product...
kathryn at 11:57AM on 01/22/10
May I make a technical suggestion? Can the writer please add a break in the post? That way, those of us to download these post via the RSS feed aren't stuck scrolling-scrolling-scrolling-scrolling-scrolling through a story that we may not be that interested in reading. Thanks!
Just another Annie at 12:25PM on 01/22/10
Umami bomb = MSG. Good to see people passing off Marmite / Soy sauce as acceptable forms of MSG. Let it be known, Marmite has some of the highest concentrations of MSG, short of MSG itself. I love how it's ok to use MSG now there's a euphemism, ie, umami.
SinoSoul at 12:29PM on 01/22/10
Holy sh-t - just realized that I got through an entire chili article without a single reference to the Simpsons, or the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum deep in the jungle primeval!
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 12:33PM on 01/22/10
@SinoSoul
I wasn't aware it was ever not ok to use MSG except for during a few misguided years in the early 90's. I keep a small jar of it right next to my salt and pepper, and often use it in soups and stir-fries. I find that the saltiness and complexity of Marmite makes it preferable to straight MSG powder in dishes.
People have been consuming glutamates for millenia in the form of fermented fish pastes and sauce, cheeses, and fermented vegetable products and to no ill effect. Don't know why people suddenly becamse scared of it (yet oddly, not of those same products) in the latter part of the last century.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 12:38PM on 01/22/10
I add herbs to my chilli: oregano, epazote, sometimes sage or savory. The herbs (especially fresh herbs) mellow out the spices and make the flavour a bit more complex. Epazote is a North American herb, and widely used in Mexican cuisine. It's also supposedly a carminative (anti-flatulent).
Sometimes I'll add a bit of asophoetida, which adds a slight onion taste. (Also a carminative.)
As for beans, a proper chilli is mostly beans, about 2/3 to 3/4 beans. Meat is there for flavour.
No bean dish should be without vinegar. I prefer it to alcohol, and it's standard in many Latin American, Creole and soul food recipes.
If I want an "umani bomb", I grind up some sea weed (I prefer laver, a kind of kelp). It's where MSG comes from, after all.
Sometimes I put a large spoonful of (pure) peanut butter after cooking soaked beans for an hour or two (but before they were softened). I used to swear that something about it made the beans cook faster, but never did the experiment to confirm this.
Mutant Rob at 12:46PM on 01/22/10
@Mutant Rob
With you on the acid. I didn't mention it in the story, but the chili does actually get finished with a glug of cider vinegar, and Frank's red hot (mostly for it's acid kick, and a little bit for it's chile heat).
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 12:51PM on 01/22/10
J.Kenji - point taken about the salt from the pancetta and broth.
winternutt: I think AB's chili powder looks good, but I've still got to get the dried chiles. Glad to know you like that combination.
lemonfair at 1:39PM on 01/22/10
@Kenji, I agree with you on all counts except the following...
Yes, adding salt immediately to the cooking water of soaked beans is GOOD. The hydrated beans act in the exact way as you described and their texture can be ruined without salt's immediate help. Nevertheless, immediately adding salt to the cooking water of dehydrated beans is BAD. Whenever I cook beans, I almost exclusively use dehydrated black beans. Having made several hundred batches, it is very obvious in terms of both texture and flavor that waiting 30 minutes to 1 hour before the beans are finished is the best time to salt them. Please clarify this so people know the difference if they decide to cook beans from scratch without soaking them.
Also, like you said, the ground beef will leach out too much liquid if you try browning pounds of it at a time. But as long as you sear 1/2 to 3/4 of a pound at a time in a large skillet, acheiving properly browned ground beef shouldn't be a problem. My favorite Bolognaise sauce by Ramsay is prepared this way - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk_CGtA4HIY
Browning in batches this small is not a big deal unless you're making 16 pounds of chili. Make sure the pan is very hot and rely on the hot center rather than the cooler sides of the pan. I would add some Worcestershire to finish. You mentioned you like anchovies and good spice. WS has that and also a little bit of heat.
resolutejc at 2:30PM on 01/22/10
Beans are a requirement.
Adding meat = chili con carne.
Is it really that hard, people?
Garvey at 2:35PM on 01/22/10
P.S. Where are my chili boots?
Garvey at 2:36PM on 01/22/10
@lemonfair - i was able to get everything at the penzy's here in town (though I know not everyone has one near them. buying online would be a good option.
winternutt at 2:37PM on 01/22/10
umm, you seem to have completely left out fresh peppers. Yes dried peppers can contribute flavors not found in fresh but that is no reason to neglect the fresh which have flavors not found in dried.
One problem with some types of both fresh and dried chilies is the skin which can resemble bits of plastic sheeting, which is why I take issue with your instructions:
which just produces smaller bits of skin. The method I was taught was to break the dried chilies into large pieces, just cover with water and simmer for a while, and then force the them through a sieve. There is really no need to cook them in stock if the paste is going to be added to a dish.
For fresh chilies with tough skins the standard solution is to char the outsides, let them sit in a paper bag to steam, and then seperate the flesh from the skin and seeds.
MonkBoy at 3:39PM on 01/22/10
What a great article. I'd never considered the umami factor when making chile. It is such a full flavored dish. I will definitely give it a try.
CJ McD at 3:43PM on 01/22/10
@monkboy
Left out fresh chiles in the discussion, but they do make their way into the final recipe (sauteed with the onions/garlic). I had no problem with bits of skin after pureeing - the puree comes out completely smooth. Perhaps with a very weak blender there'd be problems, but I don't think it'll be an issue for most people. And if you are simmering in water, why not replace the water with stock, which has more flavor? Less plain water = less dilution = better flavor in the finished dish, right?
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 3:47PM on 01/22/10
MonkBoy, I have never had an issue with skin toughness in regard to dried chiles. While passing the paste through a tamis may help a more delicate recipe, a dish like chili is so full of different textures that this step is unnecessary. Simply deseed and destem, toast, soak in 180-200 F hot water for 5 to10 minutes to rehydrate, then cook in a stock, broth or soup. The soaking method is often neglected and it really helps with the flavor extraction and ease of pureeing.
resolutejc at 3:48PM on 01/22/10
You can just grind your chilies instead of pureeing after soaking, They can soak as they cook. Tutorial here: http://cantaloupealone.blogspot.com/2009/10/chili-rub-me.html
Very helpful library of chilies: http://www.foodsubs.com/Chiledry.html
My beans get ugly (i.e. busted) with and without salt, with and without soaking. I don't know why. I make beans almost 3 of 4 weeks a month. Something else must be happening...
Msg/marmite.umami does make soup taste good, and fried chicken, lots of soup bases contain msg.
Go call on browning the entire piece of meat, that may be my new go to technique!
Cantaloupe Alone at 3:58PM on 01/22/10
Soaking dried chiles also helps to release any debris that you wouldn't want in your stock. If it's an especially hot chile, it will also help to lessen the capsaiacin while still maintaining the overall flavor.
I think the robust flavor of dried chiles is more suitable for this type of dish than fresh chiles, which are better in fresh salsas. No one wants to bite on pieces of diced spicy serrano in chili. As Kenji stated, the flavors are supposed to be balanced (sweet, spicy, salty, rich, etc.) and too much heat would detract from that. Be advised, too much dried chile and it turns into mole. The prime concerns are the beans and the beef. Ace those and add amendments to suit your taste and you'll have a great chili.
ChefR0bert at 4:01PM on 01/22/10
Awesome article.
I will have to repeat the bean experiment here at altitude. I still haven't figured out how to properly cook beans at 9000 feet.
emmmily at 4:05PM on 01/22/10
@J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
The amount of water involved is not all that much so simmering dried chilies in stock is just a needless complication, and may add too much flavor (I once made some chicken stew like dish (I think it was Indian) where I used strong chicken stock instead of the called for water and the whole dish turned out too chickeny).
Plus if you are making dried chili puree then you can make extra to be saved for later dishes. Cooking in beef stock might make for funny Chicken enchiladas the next day. At times I've had 3 jars of purees of different chilies in my fridge so that I could add them 'to taste' to whatever I was cooking.
Keeping the basics steps simple generally works out for the best.
MonkBoy at 4:20PM on 01/22/10
I came to more or less the same recipe (sans beans, I spent too much time in New Mexico where things like beans & posole are cooked separately and added in as desired per bowl) by thinking of the depth of mole poblano and dialing those spices way back. Chile is greatly enhanced by some form of cocoa or chocolate in very small amounts.
Nice work, man.
Big Guy at 4:39PM on 01/22/10
This sounds like a nice chili-flavored stew.
Fallopian Tube at 5:01PM on 01/22/10
Chili is a stew. Period.
Garvey at 5:24PM on 01/22/10
"Don't know why people suddenly becamse scared of it [MSG] (yet oddly, not of those same products) in the latter part of the last century."
@J. Kenji Lopez-Alt & SinoSoul
I'm related to someone with a genuine MSG (probably glutamate) intolerance of some sort. It's like food poisoning except she's the only one who gets it if we all eat the same MSG-heavy food.
I think part of it is that there's a cohort of Americans (my relative included) who really were not exposed to any umami-rich ingredients for most of their upbringing. I checked and she had never eaten a largeish serving of genuine Parmesan in her life. So I think that a small number of folks with a genuine intolerance suddenly got affected by an influx of umami :) It was easy to identify MSG on a package and just not eat it.
It's hard to convince someone to try an experiment that might have them hugging the toilet for a few days so we haven't done anything with the umami rich ingredients yet...
annet at 5:26PM on 01/22/10
I use about a 1/4 cup of the Brooklyn Chocolate Stout to get the beer-y/chocolate-y complexity in my chili.
Erisgrom at 5:32PM on 01/22/10
@ Garvey, I personally don't care if people put beans in their chili, but my understanding is that the origin of chili is pretty easily traced to the Canary Islander immigrants to San Antonio. In it's form as the "national dish of Texas" it's certainly without beans. So, yeah, I guess it is that hard.
thesteveroller at 5:40PM on 01/22/10
I always toast my chiles in the oven, then grind them in a spice grinder
I'll have to try this puree thingy.
And I almost always make vegetarian black bean chili, btw.
LauraJ at 5:45PM on 01/22/10
I'm sorry, but the addition of beans to chili is a relatively recent (albeit delicious) addition and simply makes it into a chili-flavored bean stew.
Chili doesn't have the addition of beans. I often prefer beans, mind you.
This whole thing is akin to people who refer to those miniature burgers that fast food places sell now as "sliders/slyders". They're similar, I suppose, but there are several key differences.
Fallopian Tube at 7:06PM on 01/22/10
Kenji: Disregard all the whingers arguing that a true chili does or doesn't have beans etc etc - there will always be haters, and those who think that their way is the only way and anything else is "incorrect". At the end of the day, what is most important is that YOU enjoy the dish, and better yet, if YOU can improve your own chili recipe (whether that means tweaking your own or trying others').
I must ask however, do you really test all of these variables you say you do? Obviously you would not come out and say no you don't, I just often find it hard to believe that for this test alone, you tested store-ground beef, home-ground beef, beef cut into 1-inch chunks, and beef roughly chopped by hand into a textured mix of 1/8-inch to 1/2-inch pieces, 2 batches of short ribs on the browning before dicing test, another batch for the missing flavour added by the chocolate and coffee, another batch incorporating the umami flavours.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love reading your columns, but some of them (e.g. the turkey burger) just include so many iterations and test batches that it seems so far fetched that you actually tried them all, and perhaps instead just described what you expected the results would be (for example in this article, the comparison of the beans with and without salt could easily just be your thoughts on what would happen or from your bias from your normal method for cooking them, and the attached photos showing the difference are actually the same batch of beans, but you slightly squashed some of them to make the appearance of your expected outcome of such a test).
On another note, have you thought about testing a recipe like this to determine after how long flavour improvement stops? I know it would be very hard to control all of the variables, but it would be damn interesting if we found out that a braise/stew/"curry" etc peaked in "flavour" after a certain time, say 48 hours for example.
inferno at 8:15PM on 01/22/10
In addition to my post above, here is a good read: http://www.chilicookoff.com/History/history_of_chili.asp
http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Chili/ChiliHistory.htm
With or without beans, with or without tomato, with or without beef/veal/pork/sausage... do whatever tastes best and call it "your interpretation of chili" so no-one can say it is incorrect ;)
inferno at 8:35PM on 01/22/10
@inferno
Yes - the only thing that matters when it comes to cooking is that you, and the people you cook for enjoy the food. As for testing all the variable, yes, I really do. For some things, it's possible to test for multiple variables in a single batch of chili, as long as they don't affect each other (for instance, different textures of beef, and different flavor additions). For other things, you need to either do completely separate tests, or divide a recipe in half and treat one half one way, and the other half another.
If you look at the turkey story, there are photos of every single ingredient I tried adding to the patties, as well as photos of the individual patties made with them, and I try to include such photos in each story I do to lend some legitimacy to it (for instance, the short ribs, store-ground chuck, and chuck roast, half of which I ground, and half of which I cut into chunks. For flavorings like chocolate, coffee, etc, all I need to do is prep for one big batch of chili, do every step up until the flavorings are added (like sauteeing the onions and garlic, cooking the beef, toasting the chiles, etc), then divide the pot into as many separate batches as I need, and add flavorings, and compare. I don't need to do a separate full batch for each minor change.
That said, a lot of these tests I design knowing what the results are going to be before I do them. The bean test, for example, I've done a few times in the past (a former colleague of mine at Cook's Illustrated pointed it out to me last year), so I knew that I'd get reliable results for the photo, so it was a simple matter of soaking some beans overnight with salt, and some without, knowing that if I cooked them in separate batches of chili the next day, I'd get the photo I was after.
So, long story short, yes, I really do do all the testing. I've always been a bit OC.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 8:43PM on 01/22/10
Bean-hating chile aficionados, please. There was an early reference to "Texas" folks moving on. Did you not read the post before commenting?
And chili, or chile, is not stew. It's chile (in my neck of the woods) and chili elsewhere. Please, again.
@Kenji: are you working on your book, or can it be found on Amazon? The near anal-retentive detail you post here is fantastic to read.
Reading inferno's skeptical note about turkey and tests, I only wonder how turkey would come out in a chili. Fortunately, inferno ends with a question-as-tip-of-the-hat to your laborious testing. That reminds me that there should be a book out of this. At least a website.
TikiPundit at 8:45PM on 01/22/10
@TikiPundit
Book is in the works. Thanks for asking :)
@Inferno
Sorry, forgot to answer the last question.
Yes, it'd be interesting to test that out, though difficult, I think, as it'd probably vary from dish to dish. The other problem being that given one pot, you can't really do a side by side comparison if you are tasting one day to the next, so any differences would be subject to your own subjective and preconceived feelings about whether it makes a difference or not. Of course, those feelings will affect the way food tastes to you. For instance, I could take the same hunk of sashimi, split it into two portions, and tell people that one piece is fresh caught that the other is a day old, people would invariably prefer the "fresh caught" fish. Beliefs are just an important part of flavor as the dish itself.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 8:56PM on 01/22/10
Wow Kenji. Great article. But didn't you learn from your boss at Cook's? You could stretch out your observations and discoveries in this one piece into a a season of magazines articles, a few newspaper columns, a cookbook or two, several tv episodes, maybe a few podcasts. Get paid, man! Dilute!
But seriously, one thing I'm wondering if you considered - the vegetable puree like in your turkey burger recipe. Would some pureed mushrooms or eggplant, for example, help in any way?
And just weighing in on the beans, I'm all for it. My life is roughly divided into half Canada half New England, and, in my experience, if you hosted a Super Bowl party and featured chili, and that chili was of the tomato, bean and ground beef variety, the response would be "Cool, chili." Without controversy. Not to take away from the regional variants (eg. Texas style) or to ignore the history of the dish. Just talking about usage as I've encountered it.
deglazer at 11:23PM on 01/22/10
God, I really really hate the beans in chili debate. It's dumb. Just because you don't like bean containing chili doesn't mean you need to complain when other people eat it. It's not like we're part of some hive mind such that if they taste it, you'll taste it too or some craziness like that. Food evolves and has variations. If you're going to be so close-minded, then you'd have to find the exact recipe from the first time that chili was ever made and only make it that exact way. Make any changes from that and you need to call it something other than chili.
@SinoSoul: MSG is perfectly okay for all but a very small percentage of people. In fact, it's probably a placebo effect for most people who say they are affected. They think it affects them, so it does. Most of them wouldn't even notice if no one told them there was MSG in something. Certainly, there are some people who have a genuine MSG intolerance or allergy, but how is that different from people who have other allergies? If everyone stopped eating things that someone is allergic to, then no one would not be able to eat anything.
wunami at 11:42PM on 01/22/10
Penzey's Chili Powder works just fine for me...
AliceBlue at 10:27AM on 01/23/10
On these cold days a nice bowl of homemade chili hits the spot. After reading this article, I'm going to have to see I have the ingredients for this one. Sounds delicious!
valleri at 12:59PM on 01/24/10
@Kenji, aaahahahaha, I LOVED that episode!! Did tasting the chilies make you think of coating your tongue in wax?
moonlyt at 8:44AM on 01/25/10
Hi Kenji,
I made your chili this weekend (with some omissions--Whole Foods didn't have any star anise and I left out the coffee since I have 2 small children to send to bed afterwards (and yes, the 3yo loved eating it, too). It was awesome--thanks for all your hard work and for upping my chili game. I'm looking forward to the book (!!).
Marshmallow at 12:04PM on 01/25/10
I am from Texas and yes, you lost me at beans. But to each their own.
leebo at 7:27PM on 01/25/10
The state of Texas vs. the rest of the U.S.
...The latter wins.
resolutejc at 12:51PM on 01/26/10
Where do you stand on the Vegemite vs. Marmite controversy?
Bill Woods at 3:15AM on 01/27/10
Really nice demo on cooking chili. I didn't know the salt in water made so much difference while cooking chili. Here is another recipe on Chili Con Carne at http://desigrub.com/2010/01/chili-con-carne/
bshrestha at 2:36PM on 01/27/10
Kidney beans in chili? You've got to be kidding. Kidney beans are SWEET. Go with pintos.
rbave at 3:19PM on 01/27/10
How to make the best chili ever? Just follow this link...http://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/view?recipeID=54
funkopolis at 4:38PM on 01/27/10
@Marshmallow
I'm glad it worked for you!
@Bill Woods. I haven't done enough tasting and testing to give you a definitive answer on that one. I usually use Marmite just because it's more widely available, but as both are yeast extracts, I'd imagine that in the dosages I'm using, they'd probably perform more or less the same goal.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at 5:18PM on 01/27/10
Personally, I've been using miso paste to add savor for years, especially in vegetarian dishes. But I'd never made the glutamate / umami connection before.
Bill Woods at 11:44AM on 01/28/10
Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do
dryknife at 3:11PM on 01/28/10
All this chilli talk reminds me of Kevin's famous chilli from The Office: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7IVFea0yEc
I don't know if his version is any better than Kenji's but it breaks my heart seeing so much food (especially chilli) on the floor.
natamari at 8:37PM on 01/30/10
@emmmily: Get your hands on some dried Anasazi beans. It's the only bean I found I could readily cook to perfect tenderness when I lived just outside Central City at 9,000 feet. You can get 'em here: http://www.anasazibeans.com/
NoPunyNerd at 1:11PM on 02/01/10
This enjoyable article starts puzzlingly with, "But! to call something "The Best Chili Ever" implies that the recipe is perfect, and perfection implies that there is no room for improvement." No such thing. "The Best Chili Ever" implies that the recipe is better than prior recipes known to the author. Perfection has nothing to do with it. The topic is not "Perfect Chili." Plain English is valuable, and "The Best Chili Ever" speaks clearly.
maxice at 5:17PM on 02/01/10
great post and love the breakdown of flavors! I just wrote about my personal favorite recipe for chili...it's a Big-Ass Pot of Chili with 2 pounds of bacon, 4 pounds of sausage, 6 pounds of ground beef…size matters.
lickmyspoon at 3:06PM on 02/03/10
Well, here I am, not being adamant but with an opinion. I grew up eating local chili con carne without beans added, and I've cooked it that way ever since I was old enough to do so. I like the idea of cooking it the way
the "chili queens" might have done it back when they had their stands on the plaza, or when the cooks on the cattle drives made theirs. Some cubed beef and/or pork, some comino, and whatever else that might be around: various chiles, Mexican oregano, garlic, salt, and anything else that might seem right. Also a slurry of masa harina or flour works well to thicken it.
I also like pinto beans (not kidney beans) as a side. I don't like to cook them in the chili because I like season them differently: salt pork, cilantro, maybe one or two whole serrano chiles.
David in San Antonio at 3:34PM on 02/03/10
wow, i never expected to encounter a discussion of azeotropes again outside of those long ago chemical engineering courses, let alone be intrigued (and hungry!). way to go, kenji!
triple e at 6:59PM on 02/03/10
@emmmily: At 9000 feet to cook beans you might want to consider using a pressure cooker which will raise the boiling point of water to a temperature that will break down the beans. At 9000 feet the boiling point of water is much lower than the 212 degrees it is at sea level and thus cannot breakdown the fibres in the beans. In a pressure cooker the new boiling point is much higher and can break down the fibres. New generation pressure cookers are now quite safe and relatively inexpensive. Your might want to Investigate this possibility.
sherm1940 at 9:43AM on 02/04/10
Kenji, I want to be you when I grow up!
(Though I suspect I am older than you are.)
shalomblack at 10:42AM on 02/04/10
"Adding beans automatically disqualifies it as the best chili ever."
It couldn't have been said any other way, or in any better fashion. Beans are nothing but an unneeded filler. For those that like it, fine, but it's not "real" chili.
Raiders757 at 7:25PM on 02/05/10
I really liked this, not necessarily because of a recipe, but because this showed me so many possibilities you can have with chili. I love the different experimentation and the information was great. I am a huge White Chili fan, even more than the traditional chili. I just love the creamy texture where no matter what you add, whether its meat or veggies, it tastes good. But alas, this is another topic feeding the bean and non-bean fanatics into a frenzied argument (oh how I sooooo love those /end sarcasm).
My rule with anything to do with "authenticity": As long as I recognize when something is not "authentic", I will not feel guilty about eating my bean-filled chili, my baked Buffalo wings/non-Buffalo wings and my filler-filled meatloaf-patty "hamburgers" and calling them burgers and chili. I like my non-traditional tastes ^.^ To each their own indeed.
YumYumFoodie at 1:12AM on 02/07/10
I've made chili for years, entered many cookoffs, won two and top two and three in two more. Most cookoffs have rules, like no beans and no tomatoes or both. When I make it now, I use both at home or for a crowd. Texture is as important as flavor and smell. I add pulled pork or pulled beef to my ground chuck. For flavor I use a chili blend, cumin, garlic and salt along with cayenne pepper and two kinds of canned tomatoes ( stewed and jalapenos added ) I've found over the years that people tend to complicate chili by adding too much, but to each his own!!! Dave
old chef at 12:34PM on 02/08/10
I made this Best Chili Ever three days ago, following recipe precisely.
Oh my - just as promised - the best chili I've ever tasted! Rich, complex, savory.
Slobberchops at 2:12PM on 02/11/10
Just made this tonight (with some alterations) and it was - fantastic. My alterations: no coffee (have an eater who reacts to it), no beans, cut the tomatoes in half. Used 2 lbs chuck and 3 lbs short ribs. More chilis - 2 new mexicos, 2 anchos, 1 pasilla, 1 guajillo, 2 pequins and 1 cascabel. And started the browning in suet rather than oil. Otherwise, more or less followed Kenji's recipe. A huge, huge success. I will be blogging this. Thanks!
patrickamory at 12:18AM on 02/15/10
since it does not matter when you brown the beef, how about grinding it very coarsely after you brown it? I'd imagine it would work with some of the fatter beef cuts
swistak at 9:43PM on 04/09/10