The Foodie Collective

BY EMMANUEL HESSLER

When I was 25, I hosted a chili cook-off at which a few university friends competed. My friend David Barmak blew my mind by introducing the idea that you could mix chocolate into a salty dish. Something else that really impressed me was how prevalent the meat was in the dish. Rather than using ground beef, the small cubes of meat really held their own as the central ingredient and were loaded with flavour and texture. This was further enhanced by the absence of the various beans I had been habituated to in my 1/4 century of chili eating. For this chili, I adjusted David’s recipe by adding a chocolate stout beer to give it a dark, rich color.
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