Diggin’ the chili…: Husband and wife duo first to both win world chili championship

Linda Odom of Manchaca blows to cool a spoonful of her world champion chili. (Photo by Wes Ferguson)

by WES FERGUSON

Linda Odom will give you her recipe, but you can’t cook her chili.

Try anyway, and you’ll need floaters and dumps. It’s OK to use the tube, Linda has found, or you can grind your own, her husband George’s preferred method. Don’t worry about the jargon; you’ll pick it up soon enough.

No beans though. No exceptions.

“If you put beans in your chili,” Linda says, “you don’t know beans about chili.”

The Odoms know, though. The Manchaca duo make a better bowl of red than pretty much anyone in the world, and they own the trophies to prove it: Linda and George are the first husband-and-wife team to each win first place in the granddaddy of all chili competitions, Terlingua.

Last month, George took top honors in the 45th annual Original Terlingua International Frank X. Tolbert-Wick Folwer Championship Chili Cookoff. Linda won the 38th annual cookoff seven years earlier.

What’s their secret?

“The chili gods,” Linda says.

In other words, you can follow the same recipe, with the same spices and seasonings, but in the end a chili cook needs a generous helping of luck to prepare a championship-caliber pot.

“It’s all in the meat,” she explains. “No two cows are the same, right? You never know how the meat is going to do.”

The competition is fierce, even if the stakes are low: The Odoms are cooking for trophies and bragging rights. An important ingredient, many “chili heads” say, is ego.

“Do you understand the chili world?” Linda asks. “Let me explain it to you.”

To qualify to compete in Terlingua, you’ve got to earn enough points at smaller chili cook-offs held throughout the year. The chili must be cooked on site, so the Odoms set up green Coleman stoves side by side and work beneath a portable blue canopy.

When it’s time for judging, you spoon your chili into an unmarked styrofoam cup. (Each cup is numbered, but the number is hidden by a strip of silver duct tape). The cup must not contain any visible onions or jalapenos or anything else that might “mark” your chili as your own.

Plastic spoon-wielding judges then assess each batch on its appearance, smell and taste. It should have a gravy consistency: not too thick, not too thin. But the criteria are purely subjective.

“If the judges are drinking beer, you want it salty,” Linda notes.

Others might prefer a sweeter taste.

“We had a friend who floated prunes,” she adds. “Everybody has all kinds of tricks.”

Because the Odoms are both world champions, they are granted an automatic berth to the world cook-off, which has been held in Terlingua every November since 1967. Here’s where the story gets complicated, though: The Odoms are members of the Tolbert chili league. A rival league, the Chili Appreciation Society International, also holds an annual cook-off in Terlingua on the very same weekend.

Each league is an offshoot of the same competition, according to Ken Rodd, a local chili judge who runs the Florida State Chili Championship.

“Like any other organization or some churches, some people wanted to do it one way, some wanted it another way,” Rodd says. “So there was a split. We went our separate ways.”

The great chili schism of 1983 continues to divide the two factions.

“We call ourselves the original,” George says. “They probably claim the same thing. I don’t know.”

The Odoms have been competing for years and have accumulated more than 100 trophies between them. George, a retired state employee, and Linda, a professional photographer, say their competitive fire doesn’t burn quite as hot as it used to.

“After you win first place, what the heck,” Linda says. “And we have more to life than chili.”

Read page 2A of this week’s edition for a recipe to make a pot of world champion chili.