Eddie's Award Winning Chili

This chili recipe has been a huge hit since we first shared it. We've been blown away by all the positive feedback and love hearing about your chili cook-off wins!

Hi, this is Lisa's husband Eddie, guest blogging my award winning chili recipe based on popular demand (mostly from my wife).

I'll never forget the first chili cook-off I ever attended. It was an office event and it hadn't even occurred to me to submit my own entry. There were about a dozen chilis to choose from ranging from incredible to inedible (the latter being heat related - it was called "The Five Alarmer" and it passed its time at the cook-off largely undisturbed).

The ultimate winner, whose chili I had voted for, was a young woman just starting her career. I was an executive at the time, which I mention only to emphasize how awkward it was when I asked her if she would share her recipe with me and she just looked at me and shook her head.

I suddenly understood the competitiveness involved in these things - there would be another chili cook-off at some point and she wasn't giving away any secrets. Thus began my personal quest to win a chili contest!

Quest for the best chili

I tried a number of different approaches in the following years, including a purist Texas style chili that shunned beans and ground beef in favor of unadorned hunks of stew meat simmered in what I thought was an excellent balance of chiles and spices. “Delicious”, someone told me after I placed third, “but it’s not really chili”.

The award winning chili had beans in it. And I had to admit it was much better than mine, in part because it had three different kinds of meat in it, including sausage.

Determined to come up with an award winning chili recipe, I narrowed my sights to multiple-meat chilis and came upon Guy Fieri’s Dragon Breath chili, which is the recipe I’m adapting here.

Award Winning Chili Recipe

This chili contains chuck meat, Italian pork sausage and ground beef plus three different kinds of peppers (poblano, Anaheim and jalapeño) which results in excellent flavor, texture and heat.

And my version has a little something extra! Fieri‘s recipe calls for either bacon grease or canola oil to sauté the aromatics. Easy choice I thought, but it’s not as if you can buy bacon grease so I got a 12-oz package of bacon, cut it into small pieces and rendered the fat myself. It produced just about the right amount of fat, but also an interesting byproduct. As I looked at those cooked bits of bacon I thought “who am I kidding? Those are going into my chili!”

Also Lisa advised that I use three different kinds of chili powder to add a depth of flavor to match up against the three (now four actually) kinds of meat and three types of chili pepper. Finally, my taste in beer steered me toward an IPA rather than the lager suggested by the original recipe.

Aside from those differences and the fact that I brown the meat separately instead of in with the sautéed vegetables, the credit goes to Fieri for an amazing recipe, especially his use of spices which generates a level of heat that is just on the edge, which in my view is where a chili should be.

My chili won two cook-offs outright including one against Dean's award winning white chicken chili.

It also took best meat chili in a third competition (lost to a vegetarian in the all-around that year) and came in a very close second to Dean’s white chicken chili in another cook-off that was heartbreaking for me.

Against a field of roughly 20 chilis and with hundreds of votes tallied, Dean and I were counted up exactly even to tie for the win and the medal was awarded jointly to us.

In what has since become known as Chili-gate, I later that day discovered that unlike the previous competition, the cooks were not allowed to vote. I conceded that I had in fact voted and presented sole ownership of the blue ribbon to Dean. I kidded him that my vote was for his chili (it wasn’t).

Here's how to make Eddie's Award Winning Chili:

This chili takes time to prepare and involves numerous ingredients, but it's totally worth it and the basics are straightforward.

Start by roasting, peeling, seeding and chopping the chiles. Keep a close eye on them while they are roasting - things can escalate quickly.

Peel off the skin. Use a small knife to scrape the seeds out. Then dice the flesh.

In the meantime, while the chilies are in the oven, cut up and fry down the bacon to provide the grease to use for sautéing (and the bacon itself!). You then sauté the chiles and vegetables in the bacon fat, remove them and brown the meat in the same pot.

Then add the spices, the tomato sauce and paste, chicken broth and beer and simmer for two hours.

Lisa asked me to advise you that if you want to be a little healthier you can skim the fat off the surface periodically which, in my opinion, for this dish is sort of like saying that if you want to be a little safer when you go cliff diving, wear knee pads. But anyway consider it mentioned.

No skimming was involved when I took first place in the cook-offs. And if you really want a healthy chili option, try this vegetarian chili or this Turkey Chili.

I also want to say that it is great to have a sous chef alongside when you prepare this chili, preferably Lisa.

One final note: for my taste the heat level is perfect, but if you want to tone it down, the best way is by reducing the amount of cayenne pepper.

Some of your questions answered

Over the years, we have gotten lots of questions from our readers, in the comments. Here are the answers to a few of the most frequently asked questions:

Here's my award winning chili recipe. If you make this please come back to leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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This recipe post was first published on October 23, 2017. It has been updated with new photos to show the cooking steps, a video so you can watch how to make it, and an added FAQ section that answer some of the most frequently asked questions from our followers. We haven't touched the recipe because, by all accounts, it's great just the way it is!