After a couple of years of experimentation, I’ve landed on a chili recipe that I like a good bit. Everybody else who’s had it is either loves it or is surprisingly good at acting like they do.
It’s so simple that it barely even qualifies as a recipe, but I’m sharing it because the effort-to-taste ratio is unbeatable. The hardest part is opening cans and dicing a few vegetables.
Plus, decades of television taught me that homemade chili is for obsessive suburban dad types who spend hours over it and fiercely guard their recipe. I was surprised that even I could get good results without all the fuss, so it might encourage other lazy cooks out there to give it a try. Take this basic recipe and modify it to build your own.
Ingredients
- 2 12-ounce cans of black beans, drained and rinsed
- 2 12-ounce cans of red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
- 1 12-ounce can of corn, drained (I’ve used the “Mexicorn” or similar variant with peppers included, but I don’t think it’s worth the extra cost)
- 1 medium-sized yellow onion, diced
- 1 green bell pepper, diced
- 1 red or orange bell pepper, diced
- 4 jalapeños (or 2 Anaheim peppers), diced and with ribs and seeds removed
- 2 12-ounce cans of diced tomatoes (“fire roasted” works best, and I prefer the Muir Glen brand even if it’s just the extra cost convincing me it tastes better)
- 1 6-ounce can of tomato paste
- 4 tablespoons chili powder
- ~2 teaspoons cumin (generally, the more the better)
- 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- ~1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- ~2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
- ~1/2 teaspoon salt (or 1 tsp soy sauce)
Directions
With a slow cooker, I’ve dumped everything into the pot before going to work, set it on “low,” and had it for dinner that evening, i.e. about 6-8 hours.
With a dutch oven:
- Saute the onion in olive oil over medium heat until translucent
- Add the cumin, let it “toast” for about 30 seconds before stirring everything together
- Add the tomatoes and mix everything to de-glaze the bottom of the pot
- Add the beans, corn, and peppers, mixing after each step
- Add the spices and tomato paste, then mix again until the tomato paste is fully integrated
- Heat over medium, stirring every few minutes, until the chili is bubbling
- Reduce the heat to low and simmer for at least an hour, mixing periodically to keep the tomatoes from burning
Or the short version: dump everything into a pot and cook it all day, but start with the onions.
I started adding some celery with the onion in the earliest stage. It thickens things a bit. A gumbo recipe will have you cook celery in its own for a long time to get to an almost paste-like consistency, because it provides a lot of thickness and scaffolding to the rest of the gumbo, but for vegetarian chili I want a mixture of textures, so I only cook the celery about as long as I cook the onions.
Interesting; I’ve always been at a loss as to why celery is essential for soups and stews, since it doesn’t give any flavor or nutrition. This chili doesn’t use any broth, though, and gets all its liquid from the diced tomatoes. So with this ratio, it doesn’t need to be thickened at all. (I have made it with tomato puree instead of tomato paste, but I was hoping that the paste would give it a little more depth of flavor).
Regular worcestshire isn’t vegetarian.
Correct. Use soy sauce or an alternative for salty+savory if you don’t or can’t eat anchovies.