Simple Beef Chili with Kidney Beans

Why This Recipe Works: With the goal of developing a no-fuss chili recipe that would taste far better than the sum of its common parts, we discovered that adding the spices to the pan with the aromatics boosted their potency. For our chili recipe, we added the beans with the tomatoes so that they cooked enough to absorb flavor but not so much that they fell apart. And we found that cooking the chili with the lid on for half of the cooking time resulted in the best consistency.