The Big Debate

The scuttlebutt online is always about whether beans belong in chili. The answer is...enjoy chili however you want. I should say, "Enjoy chili however you want...within reason". I was a judge at an annual chili contest for about three years and you would not believe the stuff some people put in their chili. Trust me, beans are the last thing you should worry about having in your chili.

Texas Chili

Texas loves to claim chili as its invention and it is, and it's not. Yep, I'm aware those are fighting words, but sometimes the truth hurts. Still, some people think that Texas is synonymous with chili. The story of how chili got started in Texas is a bit more complicated than that.

A Grain Of Truth

Chili does seem to have grown in popularity right around the Texas/Mexico border towns. That should give us 50% ownership of chili, but there's another twist in the story. Apparently, it was immigrants from the Canary Islands that popularized the dish around San Antonio and things just grew from there. This would mean that the actual origin may or may not be somewhere in Spain, or at least some of the ingredients, possibly the use of cumin started there.

Easy Chili

I have tasted almost everything in chili, from rattlesnake meat to chocolate. Deer is often used and is beer. I'm not a big fan of trying to make chili something it's not. I've tried upping my game to what the restaurants call "chili meat", but the grind of regular ground beef still seems to be the best. You really can't go too wrong with your chili recipe, but I find it best to just combine ground beef, onion, season salt, ground garlic, cumin, tomato sauce, and/or paste, a can of Rotel (that's the only personal touch I give it), and all the chili powder you can handle.