Every practiced American cook’s recipe for chili is definitive and the best. A large, heavy-bottomed wide pot or Dutch oven. Enameled cast-iron is maybe best, because if you find yourself making chili with tomatoes in a plain cast-iron pot, the fruit’chipotle chili powder acidity may react poorly with the metal, leaving the chili with an off taste.
A food processor, blender or spice grinder. You can make a credible chili with ground chile powder, and indeed we do so all the time. You can certainly make one with fresh chiles as well. But it’s our view that there is little to match a chili made with a mixture of fresh and dried chiles either toasted and ground in a spice grinder, or simmered in chicken stock. Ground cumin from the store will work just fine, as will ground coriander, if you’re using it.
But the flavor delivered by freshly toasted spices pulverized in a mortar is impossible to match. Wirecutter, a product recommendations website owned by The New York Times Company, has tips on finding the best Dutch oven, food processor and blender. Protein A great chili rests on two foundations: its protein, and the peppers that flavor it. We’ll get to the chiles, but we’ll begin with the protein.
If you’re cooking with meat, look for a cut high in fat and flavor. Beef, Pork and Lamb Chuck beef, from the steer’s shoulder, is excellent for chili. But you can also do very well with brisket and short ribs, and there are fantastic chilis made of lamb and pork shoulder. Whatever protein you use, cut the meat into 2-inch cubes, or, if you’d like to work faster or simply prefer the texture, use ground meat. In much of Texas and at the butcher shop anywhere, you can get your meat coarsely ground, which just about splits the difference between cubes and ground. But you can also use a combination: Some cooks even like to use a number of different cuts, combining stew meat with ground. It should yield enough fat to flavor your chili well.
Whatever you choose, be sure to fry some bacon in the pot before you get started, and then set it aside to crumble into the chili later in the process. Poultry There are those who swear by ground turkey chilis or who make the dish with chicken. Be careful when doing so, however, so that the meat does not dry out. Or use chunks of dark meat from the richer, fattier thighs, or even duck. Game Farm-raised or wild-shot game — venison, buffalo, moose, marsh duck, goose — often bridges the distance between red meat and poultry: It delivers powerful flavor whether it comes from the field or the sky. Beans There are those who consider beans in chili to be an apostasy. 6 to a dish that serves 10 or even 12.