Skillet Ground Beef Chili
One pound of ground beef, one pan, about forty minutes. The table shows which things go in together, which is the part a paragraph hides.
Most chili recipes bury the structure in three paragraphs. There are only four stages, and they happen in one pan.
| 1 lb Dry-Aged Signature Ground Beef | 1 brown, break up | 2 keep in the pan | 3 simmer uncovered, 25 min |
| 1 large onion, diced | 4 soften 5 min | ||
| 3 cloves garlic, minced | |||
| 2 Tbsp chili powder | 5 toast 30 sec | ||
| 1 tsp ground cumin | |||
| 1 can (15 oz) crushed tomatoes | |||
| 1 can (15 oz) kidney beans, drained | |||
| 1 cup beef stock | |||
| 6Salt at the end, not the start. The stock and the beans both bring their own. | |||
| 7Leave the rendered fat in. Dry-aged ground beef gives up less of it than commodity beef does. | |||
Numbers show the order to work in. Each cell spans exactly the ingredients it uses.
Why brown it in a dry pan
Good ground beef brings its own fat. Adding oil before it renders means the beef steams in liquid instead of browning in it. Our guide to browning ground beef covers this properly.
“Or, you know, the other side of it is it's the lower quality meat is made cheaper because you're giving up something. You're giving up the authenticity and the quality and the process.”
Gray Shipley
Toasting the spices is not optional
Thirty seconds of chili powder and cumin in the hot fat does more for the finished pot than another twenty minutes of simmering. Skip it and the chili tastes dusty.
“There's a saying that farming isn't rocket science. It's way more complicated than that.”
Gray Shipley
On doneness
Ground beef has its own guidance, separate from whole cuts. It is covered in ground beef temperature, with the agency pages linked at the foot of this one.
“Yeah, no shortcuts just means, you know, it's a mindset, the mindset of looking for a shortcut. You know, it doesn't mean that we don't look for improvement. It doesn't mean we don't look for ways to do things better.”
Gray Shipley
Dry-aged, coarsely ground, and it renders less than you are used to.
View Product- Cook to a Safe Minimum Internal Temperature, FoodSafety.gov
- The Color of Meat and Poultry, USDA FSIS
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
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