When you’re looking to make a great chili, is Miranda Lambert the first person you’d turn to? Maybe not, she’s a country star and not a chef, but she does have a bestselling cookbook and she is a native Texan. You don’t need a culinary degree to make great chili, and besides, she says right in the name that her chili is “famous.” We had to try it!

We made this chili as a part of our Celebrity Chili Recipe Showdown. The showdown is a fun project where we take four celebrity recipes — some celebrity chefs, some not so much — cook them, and then taste and compare them to see how they stack up. This match-up included Bobby Flay, Miranda Lambert, Guy Fieri, and Brian Baumgartner (Kevin, from The Office). We ended up with four very different chilis!

What’s in Miranda Lambert’s Famous Chili?

As far as chilis go, this list isn’t terribly long. She calls for:

• Ground beef AND ground chuck.
• Yellow onion AND white onion.
• One jalapeno.
• A can of diced tomatoes.
• A can of diced tomatoes with green chiles.
• A dash of Tabasco.
• Chili powder, cumin, garlic powder.
• An optional can of pinto beans.

She suggest you serve it with cheese, onions, sour cream, cilantro, and Fritos.

How Do You Make Miranda Lambert’s Famous Chili?

Miranda’s strategy is pretty straightforward. She has you brown the ground beef and ground chuck, in batches if you need to. (You’ll need to.) This happens in a skillet. In a separate stockpot, she has you soften the veggies in olive oil, and then add the meat, the tomatoes, hot sauce, chili powder, cumin, and garlic powder. She then has you simmer it all for FOUR hours, which seems like a very long time for ground meat. If you’d like to add the beans (which we know can be controversial), you stir those in to let them simmer for the last hour.

All in all, it’s a pretty simple method and a pretty simple ingredient list. We couldn’t see the reason for adding two different kinds of onion — would those really be discernible after four hours of cooking? Probably not.

How Does It Taste?

This is a chili you’d be totally happy to be served, and it’s what you think of when you think of chili, but it didn’t really bring anything extra. There wasn’t the nuanced, deep flavor of some of the other chilis we tried and it lacked spice completely. It was a basic chili, but nothing to be mad at. However! Miranda’s topping suggestions really leveled it up. The combo of the Fritos, onions, sour cream, cheese, and her chili was stupendous. You put it all together and it works beautifully.

We made this as part of our Celebrity Recipe Showdown.

To see how it stacked up, read on here:
Celebrity Chili Recipe Showdown

Brian Baumgartner’s Seriously Good Chili (From The Office)
Guy Fieri’s Texas Chili
Bobby Flay’s Black Bean Chili