The Classic Ingredient You Won't Find In Ree Drummond's Chili Dogs

Since Ree Drummond's whole Pioneer Woman image is based on the fact that she lives on an Oklahoma ranch, it makes sense that she'd have a few chili recipes in her repertoire. In fact, she's published more than a few, including recipes for chipotle chicken chili, pumpkin chili, and white chili. Of course, she also has a classic beef and bean chili recipe, and even combines chili with beef stew to make her hearty Cowboy Soup. However, her chili dogs — which she inexplicably fails to label Cowboy Coneys, despite her preference for applying that term to many of her recipes — are topped with a chili that contains no beans.

Ree Drummond's hot dog chili is made with ground beef and red onions cooked in tomato sauce and flavored with ketchup and mustard (but no pickle relish). It also includes garlic, oregano, chili powder, and cayenne. Once cooked, it's spooned over hot dogs in buns, which are then garnished with grated cheese and chopped onions. All in all, it's a pretty standard chili dog, although she does have a variant recipe that's equally bean-free and adds canned chipotles, brown sugar, and beer, but omits the ketchup and mustard.

So how do the Pioneer Woman chili dogs taste? The one comment on the original recipe was from someone who hadn't tried the dish but thinks it looks good in pictures, while the second recipe only earned a three-star rating from one person lamenting the lack of beans. Her husband, Ladd Drummond, however, is purported to inhale them by the plateful. 

Ree Drummond isn't omitting beans from her chili to make her hubby less gassy. Rather, it's because she feels beanless chili sticks better to hot dogs. This checks out, since it's thinner and more sauce-like and can anchor in place when topped with cheese. But if you prefer chili with beans, it can certainly be used as a hot dog topping — in fact, the first time I tried making a chili dog, I used canned Hormel chili with beans. But my early experiment notwithstanding, bean-free chili is fairly standard for chili dogs everywhere.

The classic Coney dog, which may have been invented in the small Pennsylvania town of New Castle (now known as the "Hot Dog Capital of the World"), is topped with such a chili: New Castle-style sauce is said to be made from ground beef, tomato paste, onions, chili powder, cinnamon, cumin, ground mustard, salt, pepper, and lard. Regional chains Skyline and Gold Star also sell chili dogs that will show you what America tastes like (or, at least, the Midwestern region), and both use the same beanless, Cincinnati-style chili that they serve atop spaghetti. (Beans are an optional add-on that turns the 3-way spaghetti chili — pasta, chili, and cheddar cheese —  into a 4-way, although neither chain lists them as a hot dog topping.)

On a nationwide level, Dairy Queen, Sonic, and Wienerschnitzel also sell chili dogs with beanless sauce. Only DQ publishes an ingredients list, but copycat recipes for the latter two dogs indicate that these chilis are also sans legumes. In summary, Drummond did not invent nor re-invent the wheel with her hot dog chili. It's a fairly a typical version, but also one that, admittedly, photographs well.