WENDY'S CHILI

The more I thought about it, though, the more ashamed I became of my cowardice. I eat a lot of chili; it's one of the yardsticks I use to measure a pub's commitment to food. A $4 investment in a cup of chili will tell you a lot about how hard a humble booze-and-chew operation's kitchen is trying. 

I'm not a chili pedagogue, so I'm not on the lookout for anything specific when it comes to spice level or viscosity or meat-to-bean ratio. I'm just checking to see how far removed the cook's chili is from the Sysco can. Is it just a monochromatic dirty orange mush flavored with chili powder and hidden under a wet cheddar blanket? Or are there distinct chunks of different things that have at some point known the knife?

And does Wendy's have the right to call their spicy red beef-and-bean stew "chili"? I say yes, they do, which emphatically and forever closes that case, and now we can proceed. 

Wendy's is the only fast food chain near me that offers chili and I needed a basis for comparison, so I started my research with a can of Hormel. The most important part of judging fast food is first fixing it in a reasonable context, and I think it's fair to say that Wendy's chili should be better than the leading canned version.


The Hormel is light on beef, which is a fatal flaw when the scant meat is supplemented with mushy, characterless "red Idaho beans" (says the label) and "textured vegetable protein" (those fake-meat soy crumble things). I could actually tell the difference between the smaller soy chunks and the larger beef nuggets, which was a pleasant surprise, but the solid mediocrity of the beef was not nearly enough to save the chili. The overall texture was pasty and gummy, and the only discernible spice flavor was onion powder. 

I dumped that mess down the disposal and walked to Wendy's, licking stray dogs and pay phones along the way to cleanse my palate. The first thing I noticed about Wendy's chili is that it costs little more than the canned crap: $2.50 for about 12 ounces (my pint-looking cardboard container was curiously under-filled), compared to $1.99 for 15 ounces of filthy Hormel. Plus Wendy throws in four saltines and all the napkins and plasticware you can steal. 

Wendy's chili isn't much to look at, but it tastes leagues better than Hormel. It's much thinner, but the sparse beef is augmented by plenty of small red kidney beans and pinky-gray pinto beans, and there are cursory bits of tomato skin, onion and, in a huh?-but-harmless touch, celery. 

The red beans were so overworked that they nearly popped when bitten, but the pinkish ones were heartier than expected. The beef tasted like it was supposed to, and the chili had notes of garlic and cayenne powders along with the onion.


I don't know that I'll ever order Wendy's chili recreationally, but it's not bad considering the price and the competition.




By: Jhoselin Portillo