For Real-Deal Cincinnati Chili, Break Every Cooking Rule We've Taught You (2024)

Most people get Cincinnati chili wrong, Cincinnatians included.

No, this is not another Cincinnati-chili-is-actually-good piece. Enough of those have been written.* I'm tired of defending the dish. Like many native Cincinnatians, I am haunted by the feeling that if Macedonian immigrants Tom and John Kiradjieff had created it in New York—where, legend has it, they peddled hot dogs before moving to Ohio—Greek chili would be a beloved East Coast diner staple, rather than one more example of the Midwest’s supposedly poor taste. But we’re going to proceed with the assumption that Cincinnati chili is good, because of course it is. It’s noodles, Mediterranean-spiced meat sauce, and cheese. What’s not to like?

* (If you're looking for one, try Cincinnati Enquirer food writer and former Serious Eats editor Keith Pandolfi's “Cincinnati chili is really just Greek bolognese,” for The Takeout.)

Spice to the Point: The Secret Ingredient for the Best Cincinnati Chili

When I write that most people get Cincinnati chili wrong, I’m referring to the secret ingredient.

It isn’t chocolate. “That's a myth I'm passionate about busting,” says Dann Woellert, a Cincinnati-based culinary historian who literally wrote the book on Cincinnati chili. Woellert knows most of the people behind the city's favorite chili parlors, and they have assured him that there is no chocolate in their chili. “That was the first question I asked every chili parlor owner who I interviewed for the book: ‘Is there chocolate in your chili recipe?’” Woellert told me in a 2022 interview for my Substack newsletter, Midwesterner. “Almost all of them laughed at me. And all of them said, ‘No way.’”

So why does nearly every Cincinnati chili recipe written for home cooks—even the Joy of Cooking's “Cincinnati Chili co*ckaigne,” a local favorite that most of us agree is pretty close to the real thing—call for some kind of chocolate? Woellert blames a Skyline Chili–inspired how-to that the Cincinnati Enquirer published back in 1981, which may have poisoned the well with just half an ounce of the stuff.

The other ingredient that sets Cincinnati chili apart in the popular imagination is cinnamon. Yes, there is cinnamon in Cincinnati chili, but it makes sense there. The cinnamon is part of a relatively traditional bouquet of Mediterranean spices that are often mixed into meat sauces, including cloves, allspice, and oregano. (Besides, cinnamon isn’t unheard of even in more conventional, Texas-style chilis or the Mexican braises that inspired them. Kenji’s “Original Texas Chili Con Carne,” a traditionalist’s recipe, includes cinnamon, as well as allspice and oregano.)

But let's put those two oft-discussed ingredients aside. The secret ingredient that makes my Cincinnati chili taste like a more exact replica of the iconic Skyline Chili than any I have ever eaten—and I've eaten a lot—is yeast. And not nutritional yeast—active dry.

To be clear, not every chili parlor in Cincinnati uses yeast as a seasoning. In fact, I suspect that most of them don’t, though some use MSG for the same purpose. But dried yeast adds a distinctive umami depth to the three-ways* at Skyline Chili, the city’s most popular chili chain, which inspired this recipe and many others.

* "Three-way" is the term for how the chili is commonly served: spaghetti on the bottom, a layer of chili on top, and then a copious heap of grated cheddar cheese curlicues.

“When you want to reverse-engineer something, the easy way to start is to take the ingredients directly off the can,” says Ryan Santos, who served a Cincinnati chili-inspired ramen at the now-closed Cincinnati restaurant Please. Santos introduced me to the idea of adding yeast to Cincinnati chili, which other home cooks have discovered independently, per Reddit posts and a childhood friend’s suggestion on Facebook. “Yeast is listed as an ingredient in Skyline Chili, and I think it’s the fourth ingredient, after water, beef, and tomato paste, and before the spices,” he says. “When I was working on my chili, I’d grab a can of Skyline and then build my recipe next to it. It’s so apparent when you start adding the yeast that that is the missing thing—not chocolate, or some other crazy secret ingredient.” (For the record, Skyline has confirmed that the chili sold in cans is the same chili served at the restaurants.)

In keeping with Santos’s approach, I worked my way through each of the ingredients on the Skyline can as I developed this recipe—discovering that most of the “secrets” to real Cincinnati chili are hiding in plain sight.

Deconstructing Cincinnati Chili, Ingredient-by-Ingredient

A few years ago, I had a plate of chili and spaghetti at a restaurant in Wisconsin that helped me understand why so many people turn their noses up at Cincinnati chili. It looked more or less like the Cincinnati chili I know and love, but the chili was the standard, all-American ground-beef version—with a pebbly texture and a flavor profile driven by tomato and cumin—and the layer of grocery-store-standard shredded cheese on top weighed heavily on the dish, and on my stomach.

That isn’t Cincinnati chili. Cincinnati chili should not be dull or heavy. It should be thin and saucy, in keeping with its purpose as a topping for pasta or hot dogs (“It’s never been a standalone,” Woellert says), and rich with warm Mediterranean spices. It should be umami-rich and craveable, with the spaghetti underneath overcooked just a little bit, to allow for a textural fusion that just won’t happen with al dente noodles. The Wisconsin cheddar cheese on top should be light and fluffy, melting into the chili and spaghetti with each bite.

Beef

Many recipes call for lean ground beef—say, 90/10—or suggest starting with fattier 80/20 beef, refrigerating the finished chili overnight, and then removing the congealed fat that collects on top for an improved texture.

Because I wanted a thinner, lighter consistency, and because part of Cincinnati chili’s everyday appeal is that it is not the gut bomb it might appear to be, I accepted that skimming the fat was a given…until I opened a can of Skyline Chili and saw a quarter-inch layer of paprika-stained tallow on top.

Cincinnati chili should not be greasy, exactly, but I found that a mouth-coating slick of fat carries the flavors of the Mediterranean spices well. “Keep the fat in,” Woellert agrees. “My mom skimmed it, but it tastes better with fat. Some early recipes used beef suet in addition to the meat,” as in Springfield, Illinois, another Midwestern city with an idiosyncratic chili—or “chilli”—tradition.

Here's where I’m going to ask you to break with a common cooking rule: Do not brown the meat. Please. I tried it—a handful of times—so you don’t have to. First, the roasted flavor of browned meat (driven by the Maillard reaction) that is desirable in so many dishes is only distracting in Cincinnati chili, adding a beefiness that competes with the signature spices. Second, and more importantly, browned meat will not give you the loose, saucy texture that defines Cincinnati chili. Test after test showed that cooking the beef before the simmer in any way, including by parboiling, resulted in a pebbly texture that did not resolve even in a three-hour cook, whereas beginning with a slurry of raw beef and cold water, thoroughly combined before adding heat, resulted in, well, the hot, relatively uniform slurry of beef, spices, and aromatics that we want for our Greek pasta and hot dog sauce. That’s Cincinnati tradition, for the most part, and my testing supported it.

Seasonings and Aromatics

In Cincinnati chili, just a touch of tomato—6 ounces of paste—will do. Too much tomato takes this recipe in the wrong direction, toward Chili Cook-Off territory, where the flavors lean more towards beef, tomato, and cumin. (Beef stock has this effect too: I tried it, and a water base works better, allowing the other strong flavors in the recipe to come through more clearly.)

For the yeast addition, I experimented with both nutritional yeast, a common umami booster in vegetarian and vegan chili recipes, and active dry yeast. At higher concentrations, the nutritional yeast added a perceptible funk that distracted from the other seasonings. The active dry yeast, which is admittedly much less commonly used as a flavoring agent, gave me what I wanted—an umami base that amplified the rest of the flavors in the dish.

As it turns out, cooks outside Cincinnati have made the same discovery. “Our all-purpose spice mix is actually half toasted instant yeast,” says Jeremy Umansky, a chef and owner at Larder in Cleveland, whose recipe for active-dry-yeast-rubbed carrots ran in the New York Times. “I want that good, underlying umami that’s yeasty and earthy. Instant or active dry yeast—any granulated yeast is okay—develops those flavors. Nutritional yeast gives you funky, cheesy flavors.” He toasts the yeast to add flavor and deactivate it. Toasting would make a delicious pot of Cincinnati chili, no doubt, but this is a (relatively) traditional recipe, in which the yeast serves as a (relatively) neutral base. I’ll leave the experimentation to you.

For the other spices, I combed through popular and historic Cincinnati chili recipes and identified the essentials: chili powder (the mix of spices intended for a pot of chili, not powdered chile peppers), cinnamon, allspice, cumin, clove. Then, I compared my dry seasoning to the popular Cincinnati chili seasoning manufactured by “Skytime, Inc.,” which shares an address with Skyline Chili headquarters. I made spice teas and stirred both blends into neutral yogurt bases, for quick comparison. After some adjustments—which included dramatically increasing the paprika, an ingredient that isn’t even in many Cincinnati chili recipes—I ended up with a spice mix that tasted a lot like Skytime’s.

To complement those spices, I’m recommending red wine vinegar, which is said to be another Skyline secret ingredient and evokes the red wine used in Cincinnati chili’s Greek cousins, moussaka, makaronia me kima, and pastit*io. Feel free to use apple cider vinegar, a more popular choice in Cincinnati chili parlors, if that’s what you have on hand. Sherry vinegar makes a nice chili, too.

Finally, I intentionally deviated from the Skyline recipe by using fresh garlic and onion in place of garlic powder and dehydrated onion, which is listed as an ingredient on the Skyline can and visible in the Skytime spice blend. The key is to mince the onion very finely so that it nearly dissolves during cooking. There should not be any discernible chunks in this chili—not meat and not onion.

Here's one more surprising twist: Do not sauté the garlic or onion. The sharp flavor of raw allium better balances the other ingredients in the chili, even after a three-hour simmer. I’m asking you, a learned cook who is sure they know better, to throw all the ingredients in the pot at once and trust the process—I say this with the confidence of a Cincinnatian who has spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about this dish, studying it, and testing recipes for it. Let's just call it the Cincinnati tradition.

How to Serve

If you know anything about Cincinnati chili, you probably know about the “ways” that we serve it, if we’re not pouring it over hot dogs to make coneys. A two-way is spaghetti and chili. A three-way—Cincinnati chili’s most classic form, which I recommend for first-timers—is spaghetti, chili, and cheese. For a four-way, you can garnish with either diced sweet onions or (canned) kidney beans. A five-way gets both the onions and the beans. Some chili parlors keep going, adding raw garlic, sliced jalapenos, and other ingredients for additional “ways,” but that’s a subject for another article.

I've already asked you to put aside a lot of your cooking wisdom for this dish. Now I'm going to ask you to put aside just one more thing: As I mentioned above, the spaghetti should be slightly overcooked, for a more coherent texture. In the name of chili-parlor authenticity, I’m also going to insist you toss it in a mixture of olive oil and tomato paste. The parlors presumably do that to keep the pre-cooked noodles from sticking together on the steam table, but it also adds an essential bit of flavor and sweetness.

The cheese, which should be grocery-store standard cheddar (rumor has it that Skyline uses Land O’ Lakes), must be finely shredded—light and fluffy—for easy melting. Do not make this recipe with bagged shredded cheddar, or even with cheese grated on the larger holes of a box grater. You will be disappointed. I don’t recommend microplaned cheese, either, though it beats the previous options. It’s too light and melts too quickly. Use the smaller holes on the side of your box grater, and grate the long side of the cheese

Finally, top your plate with a few shakes of a thin, vinegary hot sauce, like Frank’s Red Hot or Crystal. For an authentic Cincinnati experience, scatter oyster crackers over the chili as you eat it, letting them soak up the stew. Oh, and as long as I'm barking orders: Cut the pasta, don’t twirl it. Really, you should eat the chili like a casserole, getting all three layers in each bite and encouraging the cheese to melt into every beefy, allspice-and-cinnamon-laced mouthful.

And admit it. It’s pretty good.