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When it comes to chili, people feel the same way about their recipe as they do about their dog: Everyone thinks theirs is the best. I know I do.
Mine started with Chasen’s chili.
If you’re a longtime Angeleno, then you know the West Hollywood institution Chasen’s, which opened in 1936. For many years it was the host of the Academy Awards afterparty and the celebrity hangout in Los Angeles. Regulars included mobsters, politicians and the super famous: Clark Gable, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Dean Martin, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Bob Hope. The Shirley Temple was invented at Chasen’s, for the then-underage actress. Queen Elizabeth II was said to have dropped by for a martini when she was in town. Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx, among others, had private booths with their names on them.
The restaurant was as famous for its chili as its celebrity clientele. Taylor is said to have had the chili flown in to her villa in Rome while filming “Cleopatra.” (Because apparently there was nothing else worth eating in Rome?)
I’d never heard of Chasen’s nor its chili until I moved here from San Diego in 2005 and started on the first of many cookbook collaborations with Nancy Silverton. The book, “Twist of the Wrist,” was a collection of recipes starring ingredients from jars, cans, bags and boxes. Silverton was inspired to write the book by the abundance of artisanal products readily available at specialty shops and even everyday supermarkets. We asked about 25 influential people in the American food scene to contribute a favorite recipe featuring at least one packaged ingredient.
Gabrielle Hamilton, chef of Prune in New York City, sent in a recipe for white asparagus in brown butter with fried egg and jarred capers. Ruth Reichl, author and former Food editor of The Times, gave us blueberry pie with crumb topping. And Los Angeles chef Suzanne Goin sent in a recipe for Chasen’s chili using a combination of pork and beef (which the original Chasen’s also did), commercial spices and canned beans.
Umami-loaded seaweed and sesame seasoning mix with soy sauce and butter in this salty-sweet-crunchy furikake Chex mix. And it is highly addictive.
After testing Goin’s recipe for the book, that chili became my chili. Like Mexican chile-based stews that my step-grandmother in Mexico City had taught me to make, the flavor of chiles was front and center. During my tutelage in Mexico City, I had been surprised to learn that many Mexican stews that are red or maroon in color have no red tomato in them; the sauces are tomatillo-based, but the green tomatillos are stained by the enormous amounts of chile powder stirred in. This chili, though based on red tomatoes, had that same chile-forward quality.
Chili became my go-to crowd-pleaser. I’ve made a big pot of it at least twice a year, which is a lot of pots of chili over two decades, and a lot of opportunity for evolution. Tweaking chili, adding a bit more of this and a tad more of that, is half the fun of making it. No two batches are ever the same.
This guacamole will look deceptively like simple smashed avocado in a bowl, but after one bite, the heat and acid of lime juice and chiles might make you never again return to tricolor guacamole (or any of the infuriatingly ridiculous interpretations from social media).
Much has changed about that chili. And much has stayed the same, like the combo of beef and pork, and the copious amounts of chili powder and cumin. In addition to the chili powder in the original recipe, I add ground single-chile powders, such as guajillo, pasilla, chipotle and/or New Mexico chile to the mix, spices that 20 years ago I would have sourced at Mexican supermarkets and likely had to deseed, toast and grind into a powder.
This year I bought them at Pavilions. (Commercial chili powder is made from a base of ancho chiles with other ingredients such as garlic powder and oregano mixed in.) I puree a can of chipotle chiles in adobo and stir in a couple spoonfuls of that, which lends the chili an intense smoky flavor and a touch of acidity.
Make these easy, toasty quesadillas — filled with Monterey Jack or Oaxacan cheese — in a cast-iron pan or on a griddle. Pickled jalapeños are optional (but recommended).
I’ve upped the onions in the recipe over time, because the late Kenny Shopsin, legendary owner of Shopsin’s General Store in New York, with whom I wrote the book “Eat Me,” taught me that onions are the secret to any chili and that “there is no such thing as too much onion in chili.”
And I mix up the beans, adding a combination of kidney beans and pinto beans (instead of the traditional pintos), and sometimes even throw in a can of garbanzos and/or butter beans.
So is my chili the GOAT? With each pot, it continues to evolve. Each time, I give it everything I have, and I do my best, which is the most you can ask of yourself. Each pot is my greatest of that time.
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Better-Than-Chasen's Chili
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