Cincinnati Coney Quest: Chili Revolution

Recently one of our readers emailed us and told us they have their own Cincinnati chili spice mix and run the website ChiliRevolution.com. The reader wanted us to try a sample of her Cincinnati chili mix which she claims is the Empress Chili recipe. Since we want to experiment with various Cincinnati chili recipes and love free stuff, we took the reader up on her offer.

About a week later we received the spice mixes in the mail with the following instructions:

Chili ingredients

We followed the instructions exactly as stated (made it a day before serving) and it resulted in a pretty good Cincinnati style chili. The chili was definitely your stereotypical sweet Cincinnati chili, with cinnamon being the most prevalent of the sweet spices. I don't know if it reminded us much of Empress, but that is a bit hard to tell since overall our coneys weren't a copy of Empress'. This recipe called for more tomato sauce than other recipes I've seen. I didn't notice it while eating, but could after I was done. I will need to try one of the other recipes that calls for less sauce to make a verdict about which amount is more appropriate. Onion was the most prevalent of the savory spices and we could even see some onion flakes in the chili.

The one downfall of our coneys was not the fault of the chili. The buns we purchased were sub-par. I do not recommend buying Butternut Golden Honey buns for cheese coneys, they got soggy way too quickly. Our freshly grated medium cheddar cheese and blue grass hot dogs were good and complimented the chili well.

Overall we liked Chili Revolution's take on Cincinnati chili. Even though it requires more effort than opening up a can of chili, we enjoyed the freshness of making it ourselves. We look forward to trying more recipes, and even tweaking some existing recipes, in an attempt to find a perfect homemade Cincinnati chili recipe.