Chili Con Carne

The one ingredient that starts arguments

Texas made chili con carne its official state dish in 1977, on one non-negotiable condition: real Texas chili contains no beans at all, just meat, chiles and spice. Nearly everywhere else that cooks the dish — the rest of the United States, and most of the world beyond it — adds them anyway, treating beans as a normal way to stretch the meat further. Both camps consider the other’s version a different, lesser dish rather than a variation on the same one, a fairly rare level of commitment to a bowl of stew.

History

Chili con carne is not Mexican, and Mexico is quite firm about that. It’s a Texas dish, born in the 19th century in the Hispanic neighborhoods of San Antonio, where the “chili queens” sold their beef-and-chile stew at night in the plazas, flavored with cumin brought over by Canary Islands immigrants. The dish fed cowboys, work crews and prisons, before winning over the whole country during the Great Depression: not much meat, plenty of flavor.

Texas named it the state’s official dish in 1977, with one non-negotiable rule: real Texas chili contains no beans. The rest of America, and the rest of the world, puts them in anyway. The family chili con carne recipe below embraces the kidney beans, knowingly. Consider yourself warned by both sides of the argument.

Ingredients — Serves 6

• 1kg beef: half coarsely ground, half cut into small cubes (chuck)
• 3 dried chiles (ancho, guajillo), rehydrated and blended, or 2 tbsp good chili powder
• 2 onions, 4 garlic cloves, 400g crushed tomatoes
• 1 tbsp cumin + 1 tsp oregano + 1 square dark chocolate (the secret weapon)
• 400g cooked kidney beans (or not, see history above)
• 250ml beef stock or weak coffee, oil, salt

The chili con carne recipe, step by step

1. Sear the meats hard, in several batches: the brown crust is the foundation of the flavor.
2. Soften the onions, add garlic, cumin and oregano, 1 minute to wake the spices up.
3. Add the blended dried chiles, the tomatoes and the stock, scraping up the browned bits.
4. Simmer 2 hours over low heat, three-quarters covered. Chili never boils, it murmurs.
5. Chocolate and beans for the final half hour: the first rounds out the chiles, the second annoys Texans.
6. Rest and serve the next day if you can, with rice, cornbread or tortillas, sour cream and cilantro. Like all proud stews, it improves overnight.

Cooking method

Technique: a long, slow simmer after a hard sear, built on rehydrated dried chiles.

Traditional equipment: a cast-iron pot over a campfire, inherited from the chuck wagons; a heavy Dutch oven at home.

Signs to look for: a thick, dark sauce that coats the spoon, a deep heat rather than an aggressive one, cubed meat that’s meltingly tender.

Nutrition, per serving

Calculated from the raw ingredient quantities above, including the kidney beans, divided across six servings.

At 530 kcal per serving, this version — built with the kidney beans most of the world insists on — carries 7 g of fibre, a genuinely useful amount from a dish that’s mostly meat. Protein, at 39 g, comes from the beef; fat, at 31 g, with 12 g saturated, from the same source. Carbohydrate, at 25 g, comes almost entirely from the beans that Texas purists would leave out entirely.

Economic context

Chili con carne was invented as poverty food: the “chili queens” of 19th-century San Antonio fed cowboys and laborers on beef stretched with cheap dried chiles rather than fresh, seasonal ones. The United States’ own healthy-diet figure above is among the lowest recorded on this atlas, reflecting a food system built around inexpensive staple ingredients — ground beef and dried beans among them, the same two ingredients this dish still runs on.

Source: World Bank / FAO, Food Prices for Nutrition database (Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet) v4.0, 2024 data, CC BY 4.0, DOI 10.57966/41AN-KY81. Retrieved 29 July 2026. This figure describes the cost of a healthy diet in the United States generally — it is not a costing of this specific recipe.

Who this dish suits

And you?

In your opinion, where’s the best place or restaurant to enjoy good chili con carne?

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