Meet the Champs
Donna Foley is originally from the Houston area, but lived and worked in Chicago for seven years.“I felt like I was cold and hungry the whole time I lived there. The food was never spicy enough for my taste,” Donna said. She decided to move back South. At a niece’s birthday party, Donna’s sister introduced her to friends who had just come from a chili cook-off with chili to share. They hit it off and agreed to go together to the next cook-off.
They shared their procedures, guiding Donna in the equipment she needed, prep and cooking methods, and even where to buy her spices. She bought a Coleman stove and propane tanks and went to her first competition in 1997. Donna didn’t win anything, but she was hooked and became a regular.
“I cooked with different people and learned something from everybody that I cooked with,” she said. Donna even met her husband there.
Enter Kevin Foley, who had gotten into chili cook-offs through friends nearly 20 years prior. He won his first competition in 1984.
Kevin and Donna met at a cook-off in 1999, and with the couple’s combined enthusiasm, “it kind of got out of control,” he said. They were cooking competitively almost more than 30 weeks a year, often traveling out of state to find another cook-off: “Drive 12 hours, cook a pot of chili, turn around and come home,” Kevin said.
Chili champ Don Cullum is Kevin’s brother-in-law. Is the chili world really so small? Kevin invited his sister, Karen, and her husband, Don, to an event. They both cooked, and Karen ended up winning the Arizona state competition and an invitation to the WCCC. Don didn’t want to be left out, so he found a qualifying cook-off in Tennessee—and earned his place at the same WCCC.
Clearly, this group has a gift, and they were happy to share some pointers.
The Standards of Award-Winning Chili
Judges look for consistency, color, aroma, taste, and aftertaste. The best chili isn’t too thick or too thin. It should be reddish brown. While taste is based on personal preference, nothing should jump out.“If it’s got too much garlic, or too much salt, or too much sweet, or too much heat, it’s probably not gonna get a good score,” Don said.
“It’s all about balance,” Kevin added.
All three champs rely on simple and similar basic recipes, using meat, chicken broth or beef broth, tomato sauce, and some core spices: onion, garlic, cumin, chili powder, and something to make it a little spicier. Homestyle chili adds beans.
The Meat
“Traditional red chili is just meat and gravy,” Kevin said. He prefers tri-tip beef that is cubed and browned, but if that’s not available, chuck roast works. If you use ground beef, the meat to fat ratio is important. Don recommends an 80/20 blend of ground chuck. Be aware that typical hamburger meat might not be optimal. “Chili grind is a little bit thicker,” he said, because you want something that will hold up to the longer cooking process without falling apart.Cut meat can demand two to three hours of cooking time. “When you’re cooking the grind,” Kevin warned, “it’s probably an hour and a half”—and even less for hamburger meat. If you’re combining ground and cut meat in your recipe, add the ground meat to the pot later in the cooking process to avoid overcooking it. You aren’t long-cooking the ground meat to make it tender, it’s really about rendering the fat for flavor. You may have too much fat, which can be partly drained off, but Kevin always saves it just in case he needs to add some back later.
Some recipes call for mixing in ground pork, which adds more fat, but Kevin doesn’t find it necessary. With well-marbled beef or the 80/20 blend, you won’t need the extra fat, he said.
The Spices
Most home cooks tend to think of fresh ingredients as the best option, but when it comes to consistency, especially with chili, the champs swear by the dried varieties: garlic and onion powder, versus crushed cloves and chopped bulbs.“We just started tweaking and twanging and figuring it out,” Kevin said.
Different spices enter the pot at different stages in the cooking process, as some need a longer time to deepen the flavor, while others might fade if cooked too long.
“Staggering the cooking times for the same spice can give you flavor nuances,” Donna said. “Some say cumin can be bitter if overcooked. Chili powders need to cook longer—45 minutes—to fully develop the flavor.”
When it comes to the mix of spices used, Donna preaches restraint.
“Some people might want a sweet flavor or a smoky flavor. None of that,” she said. “I just want it to taste like chili.
“There’s a lot of what I call chili voodoo.
“People say, ‘Oh, you know, I add a little pinch of this or that,’ some random thing.”
Over time, as people copy each other’s many secret ingredients, “you get such a buildup of all these random ideas, Donna said.
“Somebody told me: ‘If you want to make your chili better, remove one ingredient.’ That’s a great piece of wisdom there,” she said.
The Heat
Add the heat slowly. The only way to turn down the heat if you’ve gone too far is to add sweetness, typically brown sugar, and that will stand out and throw off the balance.Donna said she likes a combination of red jalapeño powder, which lacks some of the pungent flavors of the green, and cayenne, of course. Sometimes she makes blends that have a little bit of habanero in them, but only very sparingly. Anything blisteringly hot will overpower the mix. But sometimes she does use fresh peppers.
“You take a fresh serrano, poke some holes in it, and then cook it in the chili until it’s done,” Donna said. “Then squeeze the juice out and remove [the squeezed pepper] so that you don’t get any seeds. You just get the serrano juice in there.”
The Beans
Beans are often a divisive ingredient. For the average Texan, beans don’t belong in chili. In competition, traditional red chili doesn’t allow them. However, the homestyle category requires them. While Donna has been making her mark in the beanless traditional red category, she doesn’t mind them. “I think chili tastes good with beans and tastes good without beans. It’s really personal preference,” she said.What’s the Secret? It’s All Relative
The three chili champs often use their same base recipe after all these years. But from there, Don said, “we'll tweak it depending on where we’re cooking.” At every cook-off, they study (i.e., eat) the competition’s winning batches to inform their own recipe for next time.“If we had anything sweet in it at all in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, you wouldn’t [win] anything,” he said. “But it’s got to have something sweet over in South Carolina.”
Judges’ comments also help a chili maker adjust—when taken with a grain of salt.
“I’ve learned over the years that if you get the same comment three times, like if it’s too salty or it’s too spicy, then they’re probably spot on,” Kevin said.
The secret to success isn’t about a universally accepted flavor profile, a particular method, or a secret ingredient. It’s about knowing your judges, whether they are chili cook-off officials, friends at a Super Bowl party, or your kids at the dinner table. It’s about taking your recipe seriously and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. You do what you can to make something with love, something that pleases those who come to your table, even if it’s just yourself. If that means going a bit bolder on heat, or adding beans, or serving it over macaroni, then so be it.
But if you’re looking for a good place to start, a world champion chili recipe isn’t a bad option.
