A friend of mine asked if anyone had any good Cincinnati Chili recipes. This one very much qualifies. SO much better than Skyline!

Thanks to my good friend Mike Thayer, who grew up in Ohio¹ and who gave me this recipe.

It’s dead easy to make, but it has a lot of ingredients!

Ingredients:

For the chili:

• 2 pounds/500g 90-905% lean ground beef
• 2 tbsp/30ml onion powder
• 1/4 tsp/1.25ml cayenne pepper
• 1/4 tsp/1.25ml black pepper
• 1 1/2/22.5ml tbsp chili powder
• 1/2 tsp/2.5ml cumin
• 1 tsp/5ml salt
• 1/2 tsp/2.5ml cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp/2.5ml allspice
• 1/4 tsp/1.25 ground cloves
• 2 bay leaves
• 2x 6oz/170g cans tomato paste
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp/15ml Worcestershire sauce
• 1 oz/28g unsweetened baking chocolate (or 1 1.5oz/43g Hershey bar)

Pasta:

Cincinnati chili is traditionally served over spaghetti. A 1 pound/500 gram box of your favorite will do nicely.

For the table when serving:

• Shredded cheddar cheese
• Chopped onion
• Red beans

Procedure:

Chili: Boil the ground beef in 1 quart/liter of water with a little salt. Do not brown the beef first! When the beef is cooked, throw everything else in. (Pro tip: unwrap the chocolate bar.) Let it simmer 2 1/2 – 4 hours, until there is very little visible liquid.

Pasta: When you can tell the chili is getting close to done, boil the pasta to your desired level of doneness.

Beans: If you know someone at your table will want them, heat up a can of red beans.²

Serve:

Traditionally, Cincinnati Chili is served in a bowl in one of the following ways:

“Two-way”	Over spaghetti
“Three-way”	Over spaghetti, topped with onions or cheese
“Four-way”	Over spaghetti, topped with onions and cheese
“Five-way”	Over spaghetti, topped with onions, cheese, and beans

Another traditional way to serve it is as a “coney,”³ which is a hot dog on a bun topped with chili and your choice of mustard, cheese, and onion.

Mike’s comments:

Typically, I go a little heavier on the garlic than recommended, a little heavier on the cumin, and I generally do add cloves (about 1/4 tsp., ground for 2# of beef). You can, of course, use a bit more chocolate – the “Hershey bar” in the recipe is one of the ones you’d buy by the supermarket checkout – whatever size that is (3 oz.?). Adjust the red pepper level according to your own heat tolerance.

The recipe says to cook the beef in 1 quart of water, but I just usually put in enough water to cover the beef. When you boil the beef in the first step, you’ll want to break it up into smaller pieces with a spoon. I add the spices and other stuff after the beef is fully cooked, then simmer for 3 hours, and it’s good to go. One last thing – if you use 80% ground beef, you’ll find a lot of fat on the top layer of the chili as it simmers. I spoon a bunch of it off (makes it lighter, ha ha), but if you do you might want to readjust the seasoning because the spice oils get caught up in the fat.

My comments:

Use a heavy dutch oven, not a cheap stockpot, to keep burnt chili from sticking to the bottom. Don’t ask me how I know this.

I use 95% lean ground beef, so there’s very little fat on top, not enough to skim off. See Mike’s comment about why you shouldn’t use 80% lean. I follow Mike’s advice about the amount of water

The indicated amounts of chili powder and cayenne pepper give heat equivalent to about one star at our local zero- to five-stars Thai restaurant⁴. If that’s too much, eliminate the cayenne. Only if that’s still too much should you reduce or eliminate the chili powder, because that’s essential for flavor, not just heat.

When tasting, I needed to triple the listed amount of salt, and I used 3 cloves of garlic instead of 2. Don’t bother tasting until the chili has been simmering for at least an hour to give the spices time to cook in.

Yum!

1. He describes his home town as, “Like Youngstown but without the cachet.” ↩︎
2. If you went out of your way to use dried beans soaked overnight instead of canned, you’re too bougie for Cincinnati chili! ↩︎
3. No relation to Coney Island, Nathan’s, etc. ↩︎
4. We have two Thai restaurants we frequent. The closer one is fairly mainstream, rating their heat with zero to five stars. I usually order three stars. The second place is where the Thai people go to eat. They have a zero- to three-star scale that goes something like this:
   
   Zero stars: One star at the other place
   One star: Three to four stars at the other place, the top of my comfort zone
   Two stars: Five+ at the other place
   Three stars: If you’re not Thai or south Indian, bets will be taken on whether you survive more than one bite. (I’m not making that up; I’ve seen it more than once.) If you’ve eaten a whole Carolina Reaper, you might be able to handle this, but wear appropriate PPE. ↩︎