Kenji is at it again, this time he tackled Chili. This guy is good, and I love reading his posts. PETER, if you don’t know how to make Chili, this one should help

Check it out

The Best Chili Ever

Clockwise from left: three dried chiles, a finished bowl of chili, the effect of salt on beans [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I gotta admit up front: the title of this article is somewhat misleading. Yes, we will discuss chili, and yes, it’s the best chili I personally have ever made.

But! to call something “The Best Chili Ever” implies that the recipe is perfect, and perfection implies that there is no room for improvement. I can only hope that others will continue perfecting the chili work that began on the Tex-Mex border and that I continue testing well after the last rich and spicy remnant is licked clean off the bottom of the bowl. With that disclaimer out of the way, lets move on to the testing.

My first step was to set up some parameters that would define the ultimate chili. Certainly, there are disputes in the chili world as to what makes the best. Ground beef or chunks? Are tomatoes allowed? Should we even mention beans? But discounting a few people (who are most likely either from strange places like Cincinnati or Japan), I think we can all agree on a few things.

The ultimate chili should:

• Have a rich, complex chile flavor (for the sake of clarity, I will spell the dish “chili“, and the fruit “chile” for the remainder of the article) that combines sweet, bitter, hot, fresh, and fruity elements in balance.
• Have a robust, meaty, beefy flavor.
• Assuming that it contains beans, have beans that are tender, creamy, and intact.
• Be bound together by a thick, deep red sauce.

To achieve these goals, I decided to break down the chili into its distinct elements—the chiles, the beef, the beans, and the flavorings—perfecting each one before putting them all together in one big happy pot.

Read the rest of the post on Serious Eats HERE