Kitchen Sink Chili Recipe (2024)

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This is my favoritechili recipe, ever. While you can make chili on the stove, I think a slow cookerchili is the best way to make one, the flavours simmer all day long and meld together, culminating in a hot, delicious meal at the end of your busy day! This recipe has been updated from 2010 – and yes, we have been eating this chili for almost a decadenow! It is my go-to chili recipe!

If you are in a hurry, make my Instant Pot chili, it’s fast, easy and delicious!

I LOVE a good chili andconfessiontime : the chili that I love the most, is Tim Horton’s chili. For my American friends, Tim Horton’sis a mainly Canadian doughnutand coffee shop that is seriously a Canadian institution. Going ice fishing? Get a thermos of Timmy’s coffee beforehand. Hockey practice with the kids at 6 am? You have a Timmy’s in hand.

What I love at Timmy’s has always been their chili. I would really love to be able to perfect their chili, but the closest I have come is this chili recipe.I inspected the chili at Timmy’s one day, and saw chunks of every imaginable vegetable possible in there. And perhaps some objects that were not readily identifiable as well.

So I copied the concept and put in everything in this chili recipe but the kitchen sink.

How to Make Homemade Chili From Scratch

1. Prep your veggies.
2. Combine the can of crushed tomatoes, and the two cans of rinsed beans into the crock pot, mix in the brown sugar, chili powder and ketchup. Add in all of your veggies.
3. Fry up the ground beef/turkey with the white onions until the beef is cooked and the onions are soft.
4. Mix into the slow cooker.
5. When the ingredients are nice and soft, take about 1 to 1 1/2 cups of the chili, and puree it. Add it back in, and continue to cook it for another 15 minutes or so.
6. Serve with shredded cheese on top and enjoy!

Chef’s Tips & Tricks for Making the Best Homemade Chili

I am going to preface this section by telling you that I have judged more chili contests in my city than any other person I know. For years and years I would head downtown to the Edmonton Chili Cook Offand judge chili that the best chefs in Edmonton had submitted. I have eaten more taste-tests of chili than I can count – BUT I also got to see ALL of the chef’s secret ingredients! They had to submit a list of their chili ingredients to us and I did my research!

1. Use ketchup in your chili. YES.Almost all of the winning chili’s had ketchup in their ingredients and yes, we are talking the finest chef’s in Edmonton used ketchup out of the Heinz bottle in their chili! That is because the sugar in the ketchup foils the acidity of not only the tomatoes but the chili powder, which is a fairly acidic spice to the palate. Every time we would rave about a chili from a chef, we would see ketchup on the ingredient list!
2. Slow cooking the chili.The chefs would simmer their chili’s for hours on end and by the time it made it’s way to the judges table, the meat was velvet. And that leads me to the next chili tip:
3. Ground Beef needs to be low and slow cooked.I keep reading a common misconception that slow cooking ground beef is ruining it. Ground beef benefits from slow cooking by being turned into a velvet, luxurious beef that it wasn’t 4 hours ago in your cooking process. Check out the ground beef in my Bolognese Sauce. VELVET. And that is the secret to the meat in a chili!
4. You can use my Homemade Chili Seasoning in this recipe as well, just omit the chili powder and season to taste.
5. Puree the ingredients slightly at the end. This makes the BEST sauce base for the rest of the chili and I am pretty sure that’s what TImmy’s does as well. By pureeing about a cup of the ingredients you are thickening the chili without flour or anything else.
   

Freeze the Leftovers!

This chili recipe freezes extremely well! Simply place in lidded, freezer safe containers and freeze for 3-4 months. If you want ,to make thus chili for school lunches, I freeze it in the appropriately sized containers then defrost them in the microwave and heat up for lunches.

Meat to Use in This Chili

For this chili recipe, you also have the option of going with either beef or turkey, it’s completely up to you. You can also make this chili completely vegetarian, just replace the meat amount with another can of beans and some more vegetables.

Also, while you are at it, print out my Pumpkin Chili to try another time.Just trust me. You and your family (kids included) will freak out about it. It’s a phenomenal recipe!

Happy cooking!

Love,

Karlynn

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