 Watch that. That's a Michelle Obama arm about to happen. Chili is the quintessential American comfort food. It's comforting, easy, and delicious. It's elementary. Do you want to know what makes chili chili? I'm going to show you. I'm Kisha Harris. I'm an editor here at the Spruce Eats, and today I'm making chili three ways. Classic American, vegetarian, and green chili verde. We're going to start with the classic American chili. This is the chili. When you've worked hard all day and you can get home and you have those chili feels, all you need is like four ingredients and you've got the thing in the pot and done in like 20 minutes. So we're going to take a little bit of vegetable oil just to get the onion sweated out. We don't want to put too much fat in there because there's so much fat in the meat. This is where the chili begins. Now listen, I want to talk to you a little bit about building flavors. It's not just about throwing stuff into the pot. It is about taking your time, listening, get that incorporated. We don't want color on it. We just want it to come out. And in order to help the water kind of come out and give a little flavor, I want to start seasoning my stuff now. So just a little pinch of salt. I'm going to add a little bit more oil because it's a little bit dry for me. And I'm also going to add some pepper to this. Two teaspoons of chili powder. And this is called blooming. It's really important if you're like me and you have spices in your cup that have been there for a hot minute. You want to wake them up. You want them to come alive. And then you see this beautiful color that's happening in here. That's all flavor. That's the foam that's happening at the bottom of the pan. Great. So now we've got, see, that's the sign. That's the sign right there. And here's where the ground beef comes in. It's 80-20. That means it's 20% fat. You can of course use a leaner ground beef if you'd like. And you want to, you want to cook this. You want all the paint to be gone. And so now instead of the meat going in and then us adding seasoning afterwards, the meat is beginning with tons of spice and seasoning. I love chili. I love chili. Chili feels are, it's a feasting of chili powder and a comfort food hug. And it keeps so well. Like you can double this batch if you want to and stick it in the freezer. Now we're adding the other star to chili. American chili is the kidney bean. We're going to add those beans. I like to get them incorporated. Everybody needs a minute. Listen, the salt is up to you. This is all no salt. You could really measure it yourself. But I really, salt adds flavor. Don't be afraid of it. Now we're going to take this can of diced tomatoes every bit. Listen, people worked hard to put these tomatoes in a can. And then we're going to add a can, eight ounce can of tomato sauce. You need both because you need the liquid to work with the fat of the meat and kind of come together into one product. And I'm going to add a little bit more black pepper. Now listen. Your girl is done. It's, it's done. It's boiling now. And we just want it to take a little power nap, a little disco nap while we tend to other things. So let's put the lid on. And we're going to reduce the heat to low. All right. So we have that classic American chili happening, brewing away. It's going to be good. But let's move on to vegetarian chili. This is a great recipe for all you vegetarians, non-vegetarians, omnivores, and just people who just love vegetables. So we're going to take a little bit of vegetable oil, two onions. I'm an onion person. I love onions. I mean caramelized onions. I like fried onions. I like any type of onion. I want this to come up just a little more. I want to hear a little bit more sound. I want to hear my food talking to me. I wanted to say, Hisha, I'm ready. Let's make this happen. I start with onions because they have the most water of all the aromatics. And so I want that water to start to come out and I want it to start to get translucent and caramelized. And it takes a little bit longer than other vegetables do. So I'm going to put in probably about a quarter teaspoon of salt. And the other thing that I really want to encourage you to do is just don't cook, taste, listen, smell, all of the things. Be engaged in your cooking, you know. It's going in your body. Talk to it and be with it. I'm going to add some black pepper too. Okay, so now let's talk about that sofrito. That's sofrito action again, creating the flavor from the beginning. I now in here have the onions and the oil and the salt and the pepper. And now I'm going to move to my spices that I'm going to bloom. And let's start with the two tablespoons of chili powder. And you know what I love most about chili powder is it's almost like a sumac to me. Like it has some citrus notes to it. It's got heat. It's got spice. So as this chili powder is blooming in here, I'm going to add some other ingredients. I'm going to add cayenne and I'm going to add cumin. Now we don't want to get it going too long, but now look at this sofrito. At this point, this is all lovely and this is what we add to garlic. Garlic needs like a minute. You know, you don't want to kill it. You just want it to actually season your seasoning. So again, here we go. We're building flavors step by step in cooking things turn brown and things get all carbolized and delicious. That's what happens on the bottom of the pan and that is all flavor. It is concentrated flavor. This is when we start to make the sucker. Vegetarian. Okay. I'm going to add some bell peppers. Now, I love beans. I love beans. Black beans, I make sometimes I make a rice and bean situation that I absolutely adore. But this is when you can decide what protein you want to put in. It could be meat substitute. It could be tofu or seitan or a meat alternative. And so you really can make it your own. Okay. I mean, can we just, gorgeous, the color, all of that. Now, can of corn. We are not going to drain this. We're going to use the liquid because actually we need to deglaze the bottom of the pan just a little bit. Deglazing means that all of that fond we talked about on the bottom of the pan that looked like it was burned or just looked like it was too brown. That's the flavor. We want to bring it up. We want to create a little liquid that will loosen it and ease it up up off of the bottom of the pan. So now what is chili without tomato product? I'm using tomato sauce here because this is a quick dish and we don't need tomatoes to break down. We just needed to have some substance and some depth and tomato sauce does that. The last thing we're going to add is dried oregano. And if it's older oregano, you know, you want to again release those flavors. And so you just don't want to put it in. You actually want to get aggressive with it. Now, as gorgeous as the color is for this chili, you can do more. This palette here is just the beginning. You can add zucchini. I would do diced carrots in here. And it could be anything. Any seasonal vegetable, you could finish this with spinach, baby spinach even. Oh my gosh, the other thing that I did when I was testing this recipe and I had leftovers, I took it to the beach. Since it has no meat product in it, it became a salsa. Get some tortilla strips, cold, put it in the cooler. Perfect. Perfect. So now classic American. We have our vegetarian chili. I'm going to turn it down to low. I'm not going to cover it and it's going to cook for about 20 minutes. And now let's move on to the done data. White turkey chili, their day. Let's go. This is for people that tomatoes are not their jam. No tomato product. We are going to use a Dutch oven for this recipe. Why a Dutch oven? I just think it looks great and we have more volume. We're going to have like six cups of broth in there. So I've got this preheated on a medium-high heat. Feels really good and nice and hot. We're going to add some vegetable oil. I think this is two tablespoons of vegetable oil and we're going to start building the sofrito again. So in here I have one large onion and I'm going to put a little pepper in it as well. This recipe calls for a poblano or any mild chili. You could use cubanel. You could use bell pepper if you want. There's tons of chilies you can ironically use for chili. And there's too many to go through. But if you're really nerdy like me, you'll go to the Spruce Eats and you'll see a great piece we have on different types of chilies and on heat levels. And at this point, since it's going to take a while, I am going to add in the minced garlic. This is for cloves of minced garlic. And listen, I love garlic. I have a problem with garlic. I'm a friend. Okay? I don't know how people that don't like garlic can make food without garlic. It's a sex. And here, look, use your discretion at this. I think they should be a little softer and it might take a minute. It might take a minute. I'm going to put the lid on so it can just go a little faster. And we're going to just let that go for a little bit so that they'll start to break down a little bit. I'm not an exceptional baker. I set it right there to you. Lauren is a much better baker. I will never ever tell her though. Say it to the camera. This could be a bake. Okay. But I cook with feeling. I cook with all of my senses. You can't just follow a recipe blindly and not be in your experience of what is happening. All right. See, this is what I'm talking about. So now all the liquid is starting to come out of the vegetables and they're all marrying together. So onion and poblano peppers and they haven't really broken down. They're still verdant. They're still green, which I really appreciate about that. I would even, let's even do this. Let's even taste it for the salt level because this might be the only chance that we get. The salt did exactly what I needed it to do. It's not salty, but you get all the flavors of the vegetables. Now here we're going to add a pound of turkey meat. So it's lighter in color. It's leaner than beef. It takes on the flavor of everything else. It doesn't have such a strong flavor. Gosh, this smells so good. I'm going to add a little bit more salt because again we're adding a new element to the dish. We're building these flavors up and I'm going to add a little bit more crushed black pepper. You know, it's all about, it's a poblano-based but this pepper has another dimension of what peppery heat is. Now here's the optional part. I need to get a beer. Will you pour me a cup of beer? It's never a bartender. I told you good hop will help. It's hard to find. Does foam count? No, it does not count as that. That's fine. Well, thanks so much. Cheers. I'll come back once I can eat stuff. All right, so now what we're going to do is we're going to add a cup of beer into the pan. You want to turn the temperature up. Let it boil for a little bit so we can kind of boil up the alcohol. We want the flavor of the beer. We don't necessarily want the alcohol. Oh my gosh, that beer brings out the sweetness of the chilies and listen, we are almost home. Now here are my other stars of this wonderful, wonderful chili. We're going to use white cannellini beans. Okay, we're almost there. We're going to final ingredient is we're going to add three cups of hominy, also known as spasole. I love it. I just love it. I could eat it like this, but we're going to finish it with six cups of chicken broth. Hopefully it will fit into the pot and then we are going to bring it to a boil. Come on, look at that. Isn't that nice? That's so pretty. It looks like our vegetarian chili is done. I'm going to cut the heat off of that so it'll be ready for our chili. First of all, I mean it's chili, yes, but look at the visual differences in this. This is giving you a hearty big bowl moment and this is giving you green, goddess chili moment. I think it's having them together is just so great for a chili party at home and tomato base, of course, which has a little bit more acid. Some people do not work well with acid. And this has cayenne as well, so this is going to be much more spicy than this one is. The great thing about all of these is that you can double them, triple them very, very easily and keep them in a pot, in a big pot on the table and people can go ham or they can go vegetarian ham. Okay, we have all three of our chilies simmering away. We just finished that beautiful chili verde. So now let's talk toppings like the fun part. Okay, so we have classic American chili. We've got vegetarian chili with corn and black beans and we have our turkey chili verde. So how do we pull it all together? Let's start at the beginning. Classic American. Remember, this is just four ingredients, four or five ingredients. For this one, we're going to keep it classic, classic American. My first thing is cheese, cheddar cheese, because it's usually hot enough to melt it. I do my dollop of sour cream, then some scallion, of course, and some cilantro. I mean, look at it. So gorgeous. So gorgeous. Okay, so now the tasting. Love this. Now, your science here. You want to go down into the sour cream, but not you want to go to the middle of the sour cream. I don't blend it around like some people do. I want to take, go down into it. See, I have a little dibble dabble of sour cream. I got some scallion. I got the chili product. Maybe put a piece of cilantro on there. All that work you did, well, not that much work. All that work you did, it comes right out in this product. And you would not think that this chili took 20 minutes to do. You would think you cooked it all day. It's so good. And the cheese, that little acid hit. Next up is the vegetarian bell pepper, onion, garlic, tomato, chili powder, cayenne. Watch that. Okay, tortilla strips, the pepper jack. Also, you could add some thinly sliced jalapeno, fresh cilantro, scallions. I'm going to put a little bit of sour cream on it. This is the wonderful thing about chili. Those combinations of green, white, red, yellow, purple. No, there's no purple. But you know what I mean. It's got a lot of color. The sour cream. I'm going to make sure you get cheese and scallion, cilantro in there. And you want to get a tortilla strip in there. Okay? There's the cayenne. I'm not missing the meat here. Really not missing the meat here. And that sweet, that bell pepper, that red bell pepper, really, really, really gives you the sweetness that you need to kind of round out the acid of the tomato. All right, kids. I told you, this is my favorite chili, this green chili verde. Oh, and you see how brothy it is? So like chicken soup, chicken noodle soup, when you're cold, when you have a cold. Okay. Green chili. Yes, ma'am. Haas avocado. You got to get a Haas avocado. We're going to take a little of this wonderful, salty, Parmesan-like Cotilla cheese. We're going to do a little scallion. I don't think this is hot enough, so I'm going to put a little bit of jalapeno on it. And then some cilantro. Now, perfect bite. A little bit of that avocado. You want to come down through the Cotilla. No, ma'am. The texture from the pizzo. Fabulous. Creaminess from the avocado, saltiness from the Cotilla, the brightness of the cilantro and the jalapeno. We did it, y'all. It's been a chili party. You made three chilies. Toppings. Cerveza. Friends. Family. Fun. Chili. It's elementary. So these are some of my favorite chili toppings. What are some of yours? Let us know in the comments below and don't forget to subscribe to The Spruce Eats. I'll see you next time.