Meat: cuts and chili grind

Both rulebooks govern how the meat arrives more than what it is. CASI requires chili cooked from scratch on site the day of the cookoff and defines scratch as starting with raw meat, with no marinating. The ICS allows meat to be pre-cut or ground before the event but not pre-cooked, and states in both its category definitions and its judging instructions that no preference is given to cut, ground, shredded or cubed meat. CASI’s guidelines tell new cooks to bring meat either hand cut or chili grind.

Chili grind means coarsely ground beef. Wick Fowler’s recipe from the first Terlingua cook-off, as printed by John Raven, starts with three pounds of chili-grind beef, mostly lean. Julian Capers, who placed second at the 1952 State Fair of Texas, took the opposite view in capital letters: cut the meat into half-inch cubes and do not grind it. Allegani Jani Schofield’s 1974 winning recipe used stew meat ground once.

In 1998 Raven described the competition standard of his day as chuck tender, sirloin or top round, diced precisely into cubes of about three-eighths of an inch, with nothing white in the meat. Eatin' chili, by contrast, used less desirable cuts in chunks or through the coarse blade of a grinder. The recent CASI champions' recipes depart from Raven’s description. Tom Dozier’s 2018 recipe begins with 80/20 ground chuck, and Greg Lindsey’s 2025 recipe forms 80/20 ground beef into meatballs that are chopped into small pieces as the chili finishes.