The Story of Pecos Red Chili

Some of my earliest memories are from chili cook-offs around Texas. New Braunfels, Terlingua, and anywhere else with a parking lot big enough for fifty RVs and a stage for a country band. There were trucks, cowboy hats, and 95.7 KIKK stickers on everything. To this day, when I open Packet B, the smell of cumin takes me straight back to my childhood.

It Started with Brisket

My parents had just moved into a new house in Spring, Texas. I was a brand-new baby, my Mom was running on zero sleep, and my Dad saw a flyer for a neighborhood cook-off and announced he was going to enter it.

My Mom told him, “You go knock yourself out. I’ll take care of the baby.”

So he went. And he won the dang thing.

That first trophy was actually for brisket, not chili. My Dad liked being good at things, and one win was all it took to get him hooked. Looking around for his next competition, he realized there were a whole lot more chili cook-offs in Texas than brisket cook-offs. He subscribed to the Goat Gap Gazette, the newspaper of record for the Texas chili circuit, which listed every sanctioned cook-off in the state.

The only catch was that my parents didn’t know how to cook chili yet.

Red Lightning Chili

So they taught themselves. They tested recipes, studied what worked at the judging table, and started entering CASI-sanctioned cook-offs out of the back of the Goat Gap Gazette. With every weekend, the recipe got a little closer. Before long, they were running the circuit under the banner Red Lightning Chili.

My sister and I grew up in that world. Most weekends we would load up the RV and roll into a new Texas town, parking right on the cook-off grounds or at a campground down the road. While the adults stood over propane stoves arguing about beef cuts and spice timing, we ran around with the other cook-off kids, checking out the showmanship tents and costumes.

I was a picky eater back then and didn’t even like eating chili. That didn’t stop me from winning the Texas state junior championship one year. They mailed me $200 in physical U.S. Treasury bills, which I’m pretty sure are still sitting in a safe upstairs.

The Santa Fe Fire Department

Red Lightning won plenty of trophies, but anyone who has cooked on the circuit knows that competition judging has some luck in it. Great chili doesn’t win every weekend. Eventually my Dad had a better idea: package the spice blend so anyone could cook a championship pot of chili at home, no judges required.

If we were going to put our name on a bag, every ingredient had to be right. Most of what goes into a pot of chili comes from the grocery store, and our family had plenty of debates over the years about ground beef. The soul of a Texas red chili, though, is the chile powder — and the best red chile peppers in the world are grown in New Mexico.

In the mid-1990s, before you could look up everything online, my Dad didn’t know a single person in New Mexico. So he opened the phone book and called the non-emergency number for the Santa Fe Fire Department. His logic was simple: “It’s not an emergency, so I’m not calling the police — and a fireman is going to know who grows the best chiles in town.”

By the end of that phone call, he had the name of a woman who worked at a local elementary school and grew red chiles on her family land. He left a message for her at the school office. She called him back, they struck a deal, and her chiles went into the very first bags of Pecos Red.

Pure New Mexico red chile powder still goes into every bag we make today. As for exactly where we get it? Some things stay in the family.

The Chili Lady

Red Lightning was our competition team; Pecos Red became the family business. We still showed up to cook-offs when we could, while spending more and more weekends setting up booths at craft fairs and stocking specialty stores across Texas.

Since the late 1990s, my Mom — Jo Ann — has run Pecos Red and earned the nickname “The Chili Lady.” For nearly thirty years, she has mixed spices, packed the bags by hand, and shipped every order.

The recipe inside the bag is gram-for-gram the same one my parents perfected in the mid-1990s. We have never had a reason to change it.

Your Secret Is Safe with Us

Every few months we hear from a customer who bought a few bags of Pecos Red and quietly walked away with first place at their local chili cook-off — in Minnesota, in Sacramento, in a suburb of Chicago.

We’re thrilled every time it happens, and we’ll never tell a soul. Please keep ordering. 😉

Four Generations

Four generations of our family have gathered around this recipe. My grandparents came out to watch us compete in the 1990s, and today my own kids grow up eating Pecos Red at our kitchen table.

This mix was argued over in RVs, tested on the Texas cook-off circuit, and packed by hand in our family ever since. When you put a pot of Pecos Red on the stove, you are cooking the exact same meal we make for the people we love — and that makes you part of the story.

From our family to yours, we hope you enjoy every bowl.