Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for a digital copy of this cookbook in exchange for honest feedback.

So I requested this book because of Kevin (from the Office) and because I am seriously limited in the chili making department, so I know I need to step up my game.

Something I appreciated right away was the pepper heat scale. Cause I have absolutely no idea when it comes to peppers. And the QR codes that open videos on how to make the recipe? Awesome! I wish more cookbooks would embrace the multimedia aspect of recipe making, because as someone who is new to certain cooking styles and ideas, it's incredibly helpful.

I had no idea that there were so many unique types of chili out there. This book, with all the photos, tips, and charts, makes it indispensable to someone just learning. And of course, it has Kevin!

It is a lovely book. However, my family doesn't want chili often enough to invest in a cookbook with so many variations as delish they sound.

I saw Brian this fall on SEC Nation and he was talking about this cookbook so I had to download it. If you are looking for a recipe for chili look no further. These chili recipes came from all across the country and from chefs, chili cook off winners, and home cooks. It is easy to use and you can find your own personal style of chili. I know there is an age old question does chili have beans in it or not. I know in some parts of the country those are fighting words. Well Brian has some for both camps and Brian knows his chili. So the next time your office wants to have a chili cook off check out this book and find you favorite to try. It can have meat or be meatless, with or without beans. it can even be chili on spaghetti noodles. Pick your favorite.

Reviewed for NetGalley:

I love that Brian Baumgartner embraced his Office character and a fun, and delicious cookbook out of that fame.

Great recipes I plan to try.

What a wonderful little cook book. Of course I was immediately excited due to who the author was and couldn't wait to dive in asap. The graphics and photographs used were eye catching and mouth-watering. I couldn't wait to try some of the recipes (especially the white chicken chilli! So good and my absolute favorite). I thought it was unique and special to include other people with their recipes, getting to know them a little bit. I hadn't seen that in a cookbook before and appreciated it. Over all I recommend this to all chili lovers. The novelty is of course wonderful - but the recipes are truly worth it.

It's crazy that a moment in a show has turned into such a moment that has inspired memes, jokes, and even a cookbook! The forward features Oscar Nunez, Oscar from "The Office" with a message about how this cookbook came to be. Brian, the beloved Kevin from "The Office", has collected various chili recipes including one he has perfected himself and ones that have been shared with him along the way.

Do you love "The Office"? I SURE DO!!! Brian Baumgartner, AKA Kevin, compiled a cookbook full of chili recipes. Not only have I tried some seriously good chili recipes from this book, but he adds in fun stories from filming "The Office" as well as why / how he wrote the book. It is so worth the read. Try some of the yummy recipes. Who knew there was such a variety when it comes to chili.

I love the fact that each chili recipe had it's own photo, and divided into several categories... it made it easy to choose which ones I wanted to try first! While there was a peppers/heat guide at that beginning of the book that rated the spiciness scale of each, it wasn't reflected in the actual recipe, so you'll have to look up the peppers if you're not familiar to determine what kind of heat factor you're looking at.

The recipes include some from the author himself, but many were from professional chefs, chili award winners and general enthusiasts. The variety was astounding, and there's enough variety that everyone should find something they like, even if you're vegetarian or not a beef eater.

Suggestions for future editions:
1. include a heat meter for each recipe, maybe on a scale of 1-5? yes, there is a section on peppers and their rank on the heat scale, but in flipping through the book, i didn't want to have to take note of what peppers were used and have to flip back and forth to try to guess.
2. Cooking modifications: while most cooked chili in a pot, modifications for a recipe for the slow cooker or instant pot would be greatly appreciated in a future edition! Thanks so much!

It’s a chili cookbook. So can I imagine a better book? Of course. Are there better cookbooks out there? Sure. Can I imagine a better chili cookbook? No, not really. That’s gotta be the recipe for a 5 star review. The recipe for chili? A bit more complicated.

First, its Brian Baumgartner. Kevin Malone from the Office. The king of (dropping) chili. He’s funny, but again, its a cookbook, so you’re not reading for laughs, not when 75% of the book is ingredient lists and recipes. Almost none of the recipes are his either, so its more of a celebrity stamp of approval. A lot of the recipe authors repeat - I thought 2Chefs, a husband and wife team out of Austin, tended to have the best recipes (best sounding - full disclosure, while I’ve cooked plenty of chili before, I didnt attempt any of these recipes) - and some of the repeating authors had irksomely repetitive or similar-seeming recipes, but the book as a whole had quite a bit of variety. Texas chili, red chili, chili verde, cincy, turkey, veggie, all these and others were well represented. So if you’re looking for recipes for just about any chili you could imagine, this is the right book.

As for the actual recipes? First impression was that I was surprised by the lack of recipes that had masa harina as a thickener. The ‘history’ of chili was well covered in the book (brief version: chili ‘con carne’ was a dish cooked by ‘chili queens’ in San Antonio. Chili referred to the spicy peppers that flavored the stew, which was a beanless stew of beef chunks (the ‘con carne’ part), the aforementioned chilis and generally thickened with masa harina (corn flour typically used for tortillas). Tons of recipes, some touted as Texas style, some not, had the beef chunks, almost all recipes had a form of spice, but very few had the masa harina. Does this make this a bad chili cookbook? No. Its mostly representative of chilis made across the US (and some global recipes), and the truth is that few chilis, including ‘competition’ varieties and those claiming to be ‘Texas style’ probably use corn flour. Anyway, I use masa harinain my chili (a bison-beef-pork belly meat combo packed w poblanos, jalapenos, and hatch chilis and navy beans, in brief), maybe I’ll make it into the second edition. 😂

Second impression? Wow, had no ideas there were so many ways to make chili. Many had very similar elements. Hard to make chili without chili powder, after all. But there were at least 25 (out of 177) versions that were relatively distinct and sounded amazing. Many more were more or less one-offs of the standard versions. At least a couple dozen sounded suspect - please don’t put american cheese or velveeta in your chili yall. I get it. It melts. It makes it creamy. Its not chili. Otherwise, a lot of dishesout there would qualify as chili. I think it should be fairly universal that chili is a dairy-free dish (and imitation-dairy-free as well). It just doesn’t need it. You put cheese on something to mask flavors generally, or to be the star, or to pull other ingredients together. Chili doesn’t qualify under any of these. Buuuuut….most of the recipes that are subject to the above criticism were probably intended for families with kids, and if melting velveeta or kraft slices or dumping cheezewiz in your chili makes kids eat it, I guess that broadens the target audience for this book. Fine. Anyway, I’m not going to penalize the good chili chefs or even BB (who, again, didn’t come up with these recipes) for a few relatively off recipes. Chili is probably the ultimate food not to be a snob or foodie about, and at the other end of the spectrum there are more exotic recipes that have meats like bison and gator and quite a wide array of peppers.

For anyone that enjoys chili, this is a perfect cookbook, full of information about the history of chili, a heat rate meter of an enormous number of chili ,and 177 recipes from the best chili dishes made judged by Chili Cook-off throughout America and the ICS World Championship.
Great photos of all the dishes and and some QR codes to scan and watch videos. I'm not a hot chili fan, but I found the book extremely interesting and thinking I may become a little more adventurers with my cooking..
Thanks you NetGalley and the publishers for the DRC

This cookbook is a very fun concept to celebrate an iconic moment on The Office. I was surprised to learn that the majority of the recipes were from contributing chefs, and that the cookbook was truly a book of chili recipes rather than including at least a few other dishes you could eat alongside chili. The photography style and layout wasn't suited to my personal preferences, but it could appeal to others who like the feel of cookbooks from the 90s and 2000s. Due to the amount of servings each recipe yields I don't think this is a cookbook you could realistically cook your way through in even a year - I would have loved a little more variety to make this a more practical addition to my shelf.

Seriously Good Chili Cookbook lives up to its title! I was expecting a short book of Brian attempting to ride out his ‘chili fame’ with some basic chili recipes, but I was pleasantly surprised by the diverse selection of chili recipes from just as diverse a collection of cooks.

The book is filled with amazing chili recipes ranging from beef, chicken, bean and veggie. I loved how each recipe included a short bio of its cook and, at the top of the page, in a large box, the amount of time that the recipe would take, which I found incredibly convenient. I also enjoyed how they included the winning recipes from the World Chili Champion Cook Off!

Another cookbook got because I like awful ideas, another cookbook where I discovered the idea wasn't awful. For one thing, reading about how playing Kevin in The Office took Baumgartner from just another guy on chili to getting really serious about it is actually cool. For another, good lord is there a lot of ways to cook chili out there. There's a few things I learnt from this (putting in spices at different times isn't much of a thing in the UK) and some ideas I'll be taking away. Will I cook any of the actual recipes? I'm not sure. Maybe if I'm doing a chili verde, which is very new territory for me. Otherwise, it's all about stealing ideas to make my own chili better. But this book is well named. It is seriously good and it's about chilis.

Love chili? Almost everyone does. And Seriously Good Chili Cookbook: 177 of the Best Recipes in the World is by far the best and most complete cookbook on the subject of chili I’ve ever seen. Not only does it cover the different kinds of chili, but also the history of chili, and trivia about the subject. This is a really fun book to read, but it is even better to cook from.

You can imagine every kind of chili – with beans or not – chili verde – turkey chili, Cincinnati chili – Texas chili; the list is endless. Included are chilies to top hot dogs. Included are chilies served over pasta with toppings. Included are chilies made with turkey. Included are white chilies and green chilies, as well as cheesy chilies. Included are vegetarian and vegan chilies. Included are chilies with international flavors. This cookbook covers it all.

The recipes are written in the traditional manner and are easy to follow. Some have extra long lists of ingredients, so those recipes aren’t particularly quick to put together. But, there are many recipes made in the pressure cooker (or Instant Pot) and slow cooker, giving the cook more time.

The cookbook also includes beautiful photographs of most of the recipes, which makes it difficult to decide just which recipe to prepare. However there are enough recipes that anyone can have a different type of chili every day or two for several years.

If you are a chili aficionado, this is the cookbook for you. It is one that will be much used, and it’s also fun to read.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.

Everyone needs a seriously good chili book and I'm pretty happy with this one. Everyone has their own "secret" ingredient but sometimes one ingredient is not enough to make good chili. Brian Baumgartner takes us on his journey to his own favorite recipes and then dares us to try to meet/ beat his standards. I'm up to the test, are you? Recommended for everyone from beginners to those who thought they were experts.

Seriously Good Chili Cookbook
Author: Brian Baumgartner
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

What a great collection of chili recipes! The recipes are from both professional and home cooks who have competed in the ICS Chili Cook Off. Almost all of the recipes are something that I want to make and it's really fun to see the variety of recipes. Would make a great gift for those who are fans of the Office or just want a great chili cookbook!

Thanks to NetGalley, Fox Chapel Publishing, and Brian Baumgartner for an advanced copy of the book. All thoughts in this review are my own.

I loved this! It was the perfect season for getting it too. I don't know about yours, but winter is chili season in my house.

I love a good chili so I was happy when I got the Seriously Good Chili Cookbook from Chapel Publishing, Fox Chapel and NetGalley for an honest review. I made the Electric Pressure Cooker Vegetarian Three-Bean Chili and was it ever good! The book has a brief History of Chili and Fun Facts. Some people think it originated in the 1800s. The book was written by Brian Baumgartner as he searches for the Perfect Pot of Chili. He searched all the Chili Categories and found Chili Con Carne, Chili Verde, White Chicken Chili, Texas Chili, Cincinnati Chili, Turkey Chili, Vegetarian Chili, Black Bean Chili, and Homestyle Chili. He gives you his own chili recipe that he cooks all the time. He also tells you how to freeze the chili in muffin-sized pans so you can individually reheat them as needed. He has a whole section on Hot Pepper Heat Scale and tells you about the different peppers that are available. This is a very good Chili Cookbook and gives you 177 of the Best Chili Recipes in the World.

I want to make one chili recipe a week and cook my way through this book, but that would take years! Seriously (as the title clearly states), just reading the recipes made me drool with hunger. I've made the Chickpea and Lentil Chili (seriously good +), Darth Verde (I sounded just like him after the second bowl), and the Beef Mushroom Quinoa Chili (seriously off the charts good and my favorite so far). I've never been a serious fan of "The Office"but I can say that I am a definite fan of Brian Baumgartner. He's put together a book of exactly what you think from the title: seriously good chili recipes. I'll give nothing away; let's just say that the book includes a "get to know your chile's heat factor", a chili timeline for the history buffs, and intros and bios about all the chefs and their chilis. The cookbook is divided by protein (mostly) and includes an extensive section of International Chili Society World Championship recipes towards the back. Bravo to everyone! Gotta go stir the pot...

I would like to thank Fox Chapel Publishing and NetGalley for an advanced copy to review.

Seriously good chili cookbook is packed with both new sbd age old recipes. I personally was not a fan of the old timey format but from seeing other reviews most people really enjoy the extra fluff in the book so I think it’s just me. I like nice modern pictures and a good flow so I maybe need to slow down n learn to enjoy nostalgia.

I can say the history on various versions of chili, the heat index and popular cooking methods over the years was in-depth and it is obvious the author loves his chili. The recipes are great and this book would make a nice addition to any cook’s library.