Every year during the winter season in Southern California, I get a flood of friends asking me for a great turkey and chili recipe. To help, I first try to wean them off turkey chili completely. It turns out that people don't find this useful.
When that didn't work, I suggested they use my usual chili recipe and substitute ground turkey for the beef and pork. But turkey chili needs, and deserves, a recipe of its own.
The challenge with turkey chili is that ground turkey lacks the deep, meaty flavor of ground beef. (There's a reason chili con carne isn't turkey chili.) That leaner, softer meat just needs a boost, which I give it in the form of more of everything, including time.
Start with a base of onion (a lot), red peppers (more), and garlic (a lot), cooked until this mixture is reduced to about a tenth of its volume.
Add tomato paste, which also caramelizes in the hot pan, and lots of spices (a variety of chiles plus cilantro, smoked paprika, and cumin) and you have a layered, flavorful chile paste.
It's worth mentioning that beneath many of your favorite red- and chile-tinged Mexican stews is a base of spicy tomatillos puree. With that in mind, I add tomatillo sauce to this chili to give it the necessary acidity.
Oh, and did I mention that everything is cooked in duck fat? The duck fat is luxurious, has a high smoke point, and adds a nice nuance of roasted bird flavor. The result is a rich chili so delicious and the meat so juicy (because it's not overcooked) that you wouldn't know it wasn't made from meat.
The beans are my favorite part of chili (which is why I would have been kicked out of Texas a long time ago). In Mexico there is a saying that if you need to feed more people, put more water in the beans. I say: if you need to feed more people, put more beans in the chili. This is a hot chili and can handle another can (or three!) of beans.
