How to Make the Best Chili Ever

Chili season is upon us. Let's make a pot. Well, we are back. You said you've missed the videos. I've missed you even more. We've had a busy fall. I went to Hawaii Food and Wine for the third time. Super fun. I got invited to Dak Prescott's house to cook for the quarterbacks and linemen. That was like thrill of a lifetime, which led to me cooking for the entire Dallas Cowboys team, pulling my smoker up right in the middle of practice, which I'll never forget that, and then cook for the actually worked for the Cowboys for a little bit. So it was super cool. But all that said, we also did re-grand opening of our barbecue supply shop, which was super awesome. But now we're back to what I love, making cooking videos. I would say it's cold out, but it's December and obviously it's not too cold today. I'm in a t-shirt, but it's definitely chili season. Been seeing you guys post chili all over the place. And we have quite a few chili videos, honestly. And what we're about to do, we have actually done before, but it was next month, three years ago that we shot this video. I call this recipe Texas chili. But before you tune out, because you like to make your chili a different way, this is a great base for however you want to make your chili. And truthfully, we get more positive feedback about this chili recipe. This recipe has won crazy amount of cookoffs. In fact, I call it a grand champion recipe because I won my office cookout back in corporate America of like 12 people with this recipe. But we hear from people winning their cul-de-sac contest, sanction contest, work contest. This recipe is great because it's extremely meaty. It's very filling. It's a large recipe. It goes a long way. You'll have leftovers or cut it in half and don't. But you can add things to it at the end to kind of suit it to your liking. I always say, make my recipes your own. I'm not saying this the right way. This is just a way that's really good, but tweak it to whatever you like, because as long as you like the final product, that's all that matters. Let's jump in. We did a couple of things in advance to save some time. So I took three red onions, an entire head of garlic and a can of chipotle peppers and adobo sauce with all the sauce, diced it up, put it in this skillet and just cooked it for about 10 minutes. And that's how we got to this point in this cast iron skillet. Then here's the meaty part. So this recipe is ultimately four pounds of meat, but there's three pounds of ground. So this is two pounds of ground beef. I like lean if possible, like 90, 10 for less fat. We use the coarse chili grind. So that's why the pieces look so much bigger here. And then I use one pound of hot breakfast sausage. I love Purnell's because I grew up on it. So this is three pounds of meat. You don't have to use the hot if you don't want to, it's not too spicy. Then what do we do? This is key. So I smoked a chuck roast. Well, I was going to cut it and this is going to come apart. How about that? I like to add a big cut to my chili. I've used steak in the past, but an inexpensive option is to take a chuck roast. This was just over, I'm going to cut the fat off here, just over two pound chuck roast that I bought in my local grocery store. And you got options here. You can either Brown it really hard in a cast iron skillet, like sear it hard to Brown it for a couple minutes aside. Or if you've got the time, I threw it in a Traeger overnight unseasoned and just smoked it at least put four or five hours smoke on it. If you want to smoke it. I think everybody pretty well knows how to smoke a piece of meat, but I'm going to cut this up. This is key because if you cook this all day, this chuck roast will break down and it gives you the combination between that three pounds of ground meat. And this Chuck gives you an amazing mouthfeel. I've just been wanting to use that word for years in a video, but it's just, I don't know. It's, it's very hearty, but people love it. And when you, when you're eating the chili, you know, people say like, why don't you use beans? It's not traditional in Texas to use beans, but this is what I do instead of beans. I want the heartiness from this often laugh at people that say that chili without beans is just hot dog sauce. No. So give you a little, little chili lesson here. The reason that chili doesn't have beans in Texas and the sanctioned competition, like down in Terlingua in the world, chili cook off is they don't want the flavor to be covered up by fillers, beans, corn noodles, whatever the heck you put in it. It's about the chilies and that flavor. So I prefer to add this after we get this all mixed up. If you like beans in it, then just throw beans in it. I'm just gonna use my hands here. I should probably put on an apron because I'm going to make a mess while these tomatoes in a second. So let me do that. You can let me know in the comments, if you'd rather us make this more cooking show ask and saute all the meat on camera, we're happy to do that. We're trying to make these as short, as sweet as possible. You guys know that we're all about no stick, straightforward cooking videos. We're just here to teach you a good way to cook. And like I said earlier, make it your own from there and do whatever the heck you want to do. Next step, get yourself a big Dutch oven, unless you're doing this in a slow cooker, and we're going to dump everything in here. So first, we're going to put in all this meat. And it's a lot. I mean, you can see this is a lot, but I love this because my entire family will eat it. And then we'll have it, we'll have more, you know, the next day, which people often say chili is better the second day after it sits in the fridge and all those flavors meld together. I definitely can't argue with that. Okay, we're going to mix all this up. All right, let's go ahead and throw in the seasoning before we throw the tomatoes in. So this is one of my favorite products. This is meat shirt chili seasoning. And the recipe I'm going to throw in five tablespoons. If you want it a little more spicy, go more. If you want it a little less spicy, go less. But this is a five is what my family eats, and they all like it. It's enough spice to let you know it's there, but it's not too hot. Okay, jump into our last step here, the tomatoes. So the original recipe on the website calls for two big cans, 28 ounces of crushed tomatoes and one 28 ounce can of diced. It's 84 ounces total. However you get to the 84 is up to you. What I'm doing today is I'm doing 56 ounces of diced and then a big can, 28 of sauce. Here's why I like to use the little cans. In my local HEB, you can get all these cool flavors. So these are fire roasted. You can also get, I think I've got here chipotle. There's a Mexican version. You can use plain, use wherever you want. I put all of the juice in it. And then I'm going to put however much sauce will fit in here. I probably should use a little bigger Dutch oven to be honest with you, but I'll mix this up and it'll fit. Now this comes from like a German type recipe. So usually I will add a little bit of a Bock beer, which is what this is. And I'm going to carefully mix this all up. I may go get myself a bigger Dutch oven. We'll see. Obviously this is pretty full. I'm going to pour in as much beer as will fit and I'm not mad about that because I'll just drink the rest. All right. I should have picked a bigger Dutch oven and I have tons of Dutch ovens. This is an old Griswold vintage number eight and I really wanted to use it. Typically what I use and it is very full, but I'm about to talk about cooking and it's going to cook down, uh, given the method that I'm choosing. So you'll kind of understand why. So let's jump into the cook. Uh, you certainly can make this in a slow cooker in your house. I would put this on a low setting, uh, and do it all day. But if you're in a pinch, I go high and I simmer it for at least three hours. But my preferred method is to simmer this all day and let it come together. Let all that meat completely break down and be really tender. Therefore, you know, I cook everything outside. I'm going to do it on a grill. It's a great option for this reason. I can simmer this all day or all night on my pellet grill. I'm going to 25 on a Traeger. Um, I've got Hickory pellets in it and I'm going to let it go. Um, you know, usually I said I'll do all night and I can have it for lunch the next day or at least do it most of the day. So if you go off to work, this can just simmer. If you're around, uh, in the case that I am today, then I'm going to stir it a couple of times. If you let it go all day, six to eight hours, something like that, you might get a little bit of a, you know, dark film or like kind of black spots, a little film on it. I just kind of skim that off and pitch it and give it a good stir, but you're not going to hurt it. You're not going to burn it. Uh, and then when you get off work, you're ready to eat dinner. So do your prep at night, put this in, in the morning and you've got supper, uh, for the next couple of days, to be honest with you. So I'm going to open up the Traeger, throw it in here, checking on it throughout the day. And this is going to cook down. There'll be a little more room in this when this thing is done and we'll see y'all after that. All right, let's check in. Ooh, it's looking really good. It's smoking. It's cooked down quite a bit. I like to stir it up so we can get some new chili, getting this like surface area with all the smoke on it. Well, y'all it's time. Uh, we've been simmering this chili about eight hours all day basically. So, uh, can't wait any longer. Looks killer. Smells even better. We're going to jump into how we dress this. So at this point, obviously do whatever you want to do, but I thought something funny. So a lot of times I'll put chili in a Yeti Rambler mugs and there's all these comments from people like, I can't believe you use a mug. Like, don't you have bowls in your house? Clearly we have bowls in our house, but newsflash, this is insulated and you can walk around with it. So it makes really great camp option, but I'm really going to get those people talking. Everything's bigger in Texas. And for those of you that thought this was a dog bowl, no. Longtime Yeti ambassadors learned to use products in ways that they weren't meant to be made. So yeah, this was brand new when I did this, but I learned this from my buddy, Bear Holman, one of the most famous, well-known tarpon anglers in the world. He and his wife, Jen, their table is adorned with Yeti bowls as a serving bowls. I once had butter chicken and naan bread out of these. So this is what we're doing. Let's dress it up. A lot of onions in it, but you got to do it. It's Texas. We're going with some jalapenos here. Freshly grated cheddar. Always grade your own cheese. Don't be lazy and use a store-bought. This tastes better. It melts better. If you know, you know. You know, I love a dollop of sour cream. I know a lot of you like a little avocado. That's not my thing on here, but me, I love a little sour cream on it. And yes, I can eat this entire bowl. I'm going to jump in here. It's going to be really, really hot and you've got to get a big chunk here. So I want some sour cream, big chunk of that chuck roast in there. That's freaking awesome. That is not too spicy. So the tomatoes that I used, the fire roasted, get a little smoke element right there. You've got the chipotle peppers and adobo sauce coming through. Obviously I'm a big fan of our seasoning. I think our chili seasoning is one of the best things that we've made, but that just has like a really good smoky flavor. You know, smoked low on the Traeger all day. So the smoke flavor is, it's there. It's not overly smoky. You certainly could do this on a, you know, on a traditional stick burner if you wanted. If you do this inside, you're not going to pick up the smoky elements unless you use things like chipotle peppers in it, like the can, like do a little more chipotle in it and things like that to give you that smoke flavor. But I'm telling you this, this is one of my family's favorite meals. And the great thing about it, like I said earlier, you're going to eat on it all day. You've never checked this out, our white chicken chili recipe. So technically not a traditional Texas chili because it has, it has beans in it, but I'm going to put this all in the chili playlist here. Check that out. If you want to go more traditional, make our Texas red. That's where chili started. That's the OG. It takes longer to make, but it's extremely rewarding if you take the time to do it. But either way, check these out. I know you're going to love them. Pair them with a ranch water cause Texas y'all. Like and subscribe. We're going to be back next week with another video for the holidays. Thanks for being here. See y'all next week.