Chili on The Evo Grill by Guest Blogger Mike Knapp

The weather is starting to turn a little colder here in the Midwest, so it’s time to turn up the heat.

Not just on our thermostats, but in our food as well. When the temperature starts dropping, we are always looking for foods that taste good and give us a warm feeling for a while.

For me, that means chili. I made my first batch of chili a couple of weeks ago, but for my second one, I decided to give it a little twist and make it on my Evo flattop grill.

What I love about Evo is that it’s far from conventional. If you have read my previous blog posts, you know that I like to mix it up a little bit. Of course, an Evo grill is perfect for “regular” grilling, but its design and capabilities also leave things open to experimentation.

Here’s what I brought to the grill:

• 1 ½ 32 oz. cans of condensed tomato soup
• One pound of ground turkey, although you can substitute any kind of protein you’d like
• 1 ½ cups of chopped peppers
• 1 ½ cups frozen corn
• 1 cup of onions
• 1 can of chopped tomatoes
• Chili pepper
• Cumin
• Kosher salt (I like the bigger grains)
• Ground pepper
• Minced garlic

When I make chili in my slow cooker, I brown the meat and then mix everything together. This time, I prepared everything on the grill and added the spices into the ingredients before they went into the pan.

So simultaneously I browned the turkey, roasted the corn and grilled the onions and peppers on the Evo, with the temperature dial for both zones set in between Low and Medium.

When it comes to chili, how I use the spices is totally based on taste, but I wanted to give all of the ingredients a head start. With the meat browning in the middle and the veggies around it in the other zone, I mixed in a little chili pepper, salt, pepper and minced garlic. I used a spatula to mix the spices into the meats and veggies, and grilled everything just like I would if I were making everything separately.

Once it was all ready, I put the two cans of tomato soup into a 4-quart pot and added all of the ingredients, then added the spices again, just like I normally would. I moved the pot to the middle of the Evo and turned the heat up to medium.

I covered the pot and then did my usual, stirring every 10 minutes or so, taking a quick taste, then adding spices to get to the taste I wanted. I probably had it on the Evo for about an hour.

The result was a chili that had a little extra kick from the ingredients. The next time I make it this way, I’ll probably cut back to just 1 ½ cans of soup because I like the ingredients to be the focus of the dish, meaning I like it without a lot of liquid.

I thought it turned out really well, and my wife, who acts as my unbiased taste-tester, said it was the best chili I’ve ever made. No doubt I will be utilizing my Evo to make chili for the rest of the season.

Happy fall, y’all! Guest Blogger Mike Knapp