The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

Here’s where you’ve got to make some creative choices.
Many vegetarian chiles take the kitchen-sink, big-car-
compensation approach: Hey, we can’t use beef, is the
apparent thought process, so let’s throw in every damn type
of bean and vegetable imaginable. That method definitely
gets you textural as well as flavor variety, but it can become
a bit too jumbled. Better to make a couple of well-balanced
choices and focus on perfecting them.
Kidney beans are a must in my chilis; I grew up with
kidney beans in my chili, and I will continue to enjoy them
in my chili. You, on the other hand, are free to substitute
whatever type of bean you want. There’s certainly
something to be said for dried beans, and I do sometimes
opt to brine dried beans overnight to make chili 100 percent
from scratch, but canned beans are a sure thing. They’re
never over- or undercooked, they’re never bloated or
busted. They are lacking in the flavor department, but with a
good simmer in a very flavorful liquid, you can easily make
up for this (see “How to Make Canned Beans Taste Good,”
here). And the great thing is that the liquid base for chili is
naturally low in pH (both the chiles and the tomatoes are
acidic), and beans and vegetables soften very slowly in
acidic liquid. This means you can simmer your canned
beans for a significant period of time in your chili before
they really start to break down.
But what about more texture? I tried using a mixture of
kidney beans and other smaller beans and grains (chickpeas,
flageolets, barley), but the real key turned out to be using
the food processor. By pulsing a couple cans of chickpeas
in the food processor, I was able to roughly chop them into