About the Chili Cook-off World Championships

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The first World Championship Chili Cook-off occurred in 1967 and continues to grow yearly. It is a highly anticipated event featuring hundreds of chefs competing for the World's Best Chili prize.

CHILI, THE MEXICAN & AMERICAN FUSION OF FLAVOR

To understand the southwestern United States, you need to understand chili. Chili is a genuine Mexican-American invention, a stew perfected on the cattle drives between northern Mexico and Montana during the western expansion of the 19th century. San Antonio, Texas, popularized the hash. Today it is cooked in a variety of ways with different ingredients. Chili is a gastronomic art form; don't mess with the chili chef!

Beans, one of the easiest to transport and inexpensive protein sources, were the cowboys' main sustenance on the cattle trail. Often, beans were all they had, so the cowboys, a large percentage of whom were Latino and influenced by Central American cuisine, mixed these with spices and chilies to take the monotony out of the hearty dish. When meat, usually beef, bison, or deer, was available, it was added, creating "chili con carne," or chili with meat.

Traditional chili does not include beans, only meat, spices, and chilis.
Homestyle chili contains beans, chilies, and spices with or without meat.
Green chili is made using various green rather than red chilis and can contain meat and beans.

CHILI’S COUSINS AND FORBEARERS

What we call chili today isn't the first dish to play with chilis, beans, and meat.

In the Middle East, tribes, traders, and travelers make a bean-based hot stew called ful (sometimes spelled fuol), which is eaten on flatbread dipped into a common pot; some recipes are pretty hot with peppers and chilies. Like American chili, each nation in West Asia and North Africa has its unique spin on ful, and ful chefs guard their secret family recipes with vigor! Turkey has a delicious meat stew cooked and buried in a fire within clay pots called Güveç, an ancient cousin of chili without beans.

Pioneers, trappers, explorers, and homesteaders created dried chili bricks that easily traveled. The bricks were dropped in boiling water, and the dinner was ready. The bricking recipe is found in ""Mexican Gold Trail: The Journey of a Forty-niner,"" published in 1849 by George W B Evens. Bricks included fat, beef, and spices pounded into blocks and could be combined with anything found on the trail.

Immigrants from the Canary Islands off West Africa settling in San Antonio in 1723 created a dish combining local peppers, spices, wild onions, garlic, meat, and coconut. Other stories of chili's origin point to the Aztecs, Spanish Conquistadors, laundry ladies, and even nuns. What is known is that 1828 was the first time the Mexican-American dish was referenced in a newspaper.

Chili combines with hamburgers, hotdogs, and nachos. It can be served in bread bowls, as a casserole, as a garnish, or eaten ala carte. Top it with cheese, bacon, crackers, chips, sour cream, or sesame seeds. It's really up to the chef what goes in it. Individual cultures create their versions using locally available ingredients. The only requirement for authenticity is that the recipe includes several chili varieties.