The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

what? Beans can taste good in chili. Tomatoes can taste
good in chili. Heck, even pork and tomatillos can taste good
in chili. So why shouldn’t we be able to make a completely
meatless version that tastes great as well?
I’ve seen a few decent vegetarian chilis in my lifetime,
but for some reason, they all seem to fall into the “30
minutes or less” camp. That in and of itself is not a bad
thing—vegetarian chili as a general rule doesn’t need to be
cooked as long as meat-based chilis because vegetables,
especially canned beans, tenderize faster than meat—but
long, slow cooking nets you benefits in the flavor
development. Fast chili recipes are inevitably not quite as
rich and complex as you’d like them to be. My goal was to
create a 100-percent vegetarian (actually, it’s vegan) chili
that has all of the deep flavor, textural contrast, and rib-
sticking richness that the best chili should have.
First things first: faux meat is not in the picture. I want my
vegetarian chili to celebrate vegetables and legumes, not to
try and imitate a meaty chili. With that out of the way, we’ll
move on to the second thing: great chili has to start with
great chiles. That’s what it’s all about. I’ve seen recipes
calling for just a couple tablespoons of prefab chili powder
for an entire pot of beans and tomatoes. The only way to
achieve great flavor is to blend up the chiles yourself,
starting with whole dried chiles. And we’ve already got a
great recipe for a complex chile paste devised for the meat
chili, so why not use it here as well?
Next up, the beans. For me, a great chili has to show
some character and diversity. You don’t want completely
uniform beans in every bite, you want a range of textures.