Can a Chili Kit Make Good Chili?

Yesterday’s discussion about stockpots got me thinking about chili.  Not the hatch green chile that we’ve talked about before, but good old American Texas red chili.  Which was ironic, because I just finished the last pack of a chili mix that my brother bought me for my birthday last November called Carroll Shelby’s Original Texas Chili Kit .  This stuff was so good that I went looking for more, but couldn’t find it in the grocery store.  I should have known to just look on Amazon in the first place.

I was glad to see that my taste in chili seems to line up with most of the Amazon reviewers – they all gave this stuff five stars!  The packaging isn’t fancy, just a little brown paper bag, but with four separate seasoning  packets inside.

• One chili seasoning packet
• One cayenne pepper packet
• One seasoning salt packet
• One packet of masa harina for thickening

You bring the two pounds of ground beef, the 8 ounce can of tomato sauce and some water.  That’s it.  Easy customized cooking in a kit.  Great, huh?

One of the things that I like about this product is that instead of just dumping all the seasonings into a one-size-fits-all envelope, Carroll Shelby’s Chili Kit makes it easy to spice things up just the way you want them.  That’s good because not everybody likes their chili the same way.  Jay and I are not adverse to hot and spicy, so the entire packet of cayenne pepper goes into our chili.  In fact, he adds hot sauce to his at the table – he’s gonna turn into a fire-breathing dragon one day.  Sometimes I decide to add a can of pinto beans (not kidney beans – pinto beans, and don’t forget to rinse off all the can goop before you put them in the pot).  The beans make our chili pretty thick, so I leave out the masa harina.  If I want to get fancy, just add some onions or green pepper and serve with some cheese on top.

Shelby’s Chile Mix has a great high quality, perfectly blended chili seasoning, rich, slightly smokey and full of flavor.  If I could find this in the spice department, I might not bother with the kit.  Like curry, chili powder is actually a mix of seasonings including paprika, cumin, cayenne, oregano, garlic and some other stuff.  It’s this stuff that makes the Shelby’s Chile Mix so delicious, and it’s a damn convenient product, too.

Less convenient is that when you order from Amazon, you’ll have to buy 12 of these kits.  On the positive side, the price is good (only $28.25 for 12 chile kits with FREE shipping) and this stuff is good, easy and makes at least six servings.  If you can find it locally, give it a try.  Then, when you want more, just click here to order.

P.S. Out of curiosity, I wanted to find out who this Carroll Shelby guy really was.  Turns out, he was some big race car driver in the late 1950′s and 1960′s, the creator of the Shelby-Mustang and one of the original founders of the World’s first Championship Chili Cook off held in Texas back in 1967.  Mark my words:  A hundred years from now, he’ll be remembered for the chili not the race cars.

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