Cold rainy weekend + chili perfection = yummy evening! But seriously, we really did win a 1st place with this chili- at our company's chili cook off! We based it off Guy Fieri's Dragon Breath Chili. We've started adding our own twist, and it's turned out perfect every time! So since I'm sure you've already looked at Guy's recipe by now, right? So I'll tell you what we did differently.
For the chuck meat, we use the stew meat at our local Publix. It comes chunked, but we like to cut it up even smaller for bite sized pieces (it wasn't quite as good in our test run with the big chunks), then bread it lightly with flour, and brown it in a separate pan. This method was suggested by my uncle when we made it for a Georgia Tech tailgate, oh football season.....
Anyway, back to our modifications.... for the chiles we deviate a
little. We can never find some of the chiles, so we've just used
poblanos. And instead of 2 jalapenos, I just use one. Yeah, I'm not big
on heat....We like to add 2 cans of beer and 2 cups of chicken broth, double what Guy uses. A lot of it evaporates and it was quite thick the first time we made it. And we just add 1 can of each bean, instead of 2. Everything else we do is the same as Guy's recipe, and it always turns out delicious!
Don't let the sheer number of ingredients scare you off- 23 ingredients! A lot of them are spices and are pretty common, but are so much better than the chili mix packages you can get at the stores. Oh, and for those that know me, you must have realized by now that it's not actually 'dragon breath' (at least the way we make it), otherwise I would have been hospitalized by now!
