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For Kent Rollins, the American West isn’t just a backdrop — it’s an ingredient.
The star of the Outdoor Channel’s “Cast Iron Cowboy” has spent decades preserving cowboy cooking, but his rich and fiery bison chili recipe taps into something even older: a protein-packed staple once prized on the trail.
As Rollins noted while cooking the dish in an on-camera interview with Fox News Digital, bison is one of the leanest, “healthiest meats” a modern cook can put in a pot.
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“When [the weather] begins to cool off, I begin to have a hankering for chili,” Rollins said. “But this is not just your ordinary chili. This is bison chili.”
The meal was featured in a recent episode of “Cast Iron Cowboy,” which has been renewed for a second season.
“There’s not a lot of fat in the meat that’s in here,” he said.
Rollins begins by browning two pounds of ground bison with diced yellow onion.
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He then adds Ro-Tel tomatoes with green chilies, tomato sauce, jalapeños, adobo sauce and his own chili seasoning. He also adds beans.
“You’re getting an extra push of protein from the beans,” Rollins said. “But that bison meat is going to give you a lot of protein, a lot of power.”
It’s a simple one-pot meal, but it carries the weight of cowboy history.
On cattle drives more than a century ago, cowboys almost never ate the longhorns they pushed to market, Rollins said. But if they spotted a bison, cowboys would shoot it and turn it into a hearty stew to fuel the men who worked from before sunrise to after sundown.
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“This is a frontier cowboy Western heritage meal classic,” Rollins said. “It’s always been around.”
Bison has been making what he calls “a big surge” in recent years as a “really high protein meat that’s also really good for you to eat.”
It’s naturally lean and low in cholesterol, Rollins said.
“Wild game is your best bet,” he added.
Rollins said finding bison at a nearby store is easier than many people assume. “Nearly every grocery store of any size will have some bison meat,” he said.
If not, online ranchers and suppliers can ship it directly to your door.
Despite the frontier flair, Rollins insists cowboy cooking is for everyone.
Bison meat tends to be more costly — mostly due to limited supply, higher production and processing costs, smaller-scale ranching and “the unique challenges of raising and delivering bison compared with conventional beef,” according to the Institute for Environmental Research and Education, based in Washington state.
Yet “continued strong consumer demand has kept wholesale prices stable for the past four years,” said the National Bison Association in Colorado.
“Bison are making a comeback — at grocery stores, restaurants, and, slowly but surely, on America’s wide-open plains,” Modern Farmer pointed out.
As always, Rollins cooks in cast iron — a tool he believes not only honors cowboy tradition but improves the final dish.
Cast iron “is always going to bring you a better flavor when you’re cooking with it,” he said, especially when simmering chili or searing meat.
“It holds heat well. So, really, you’re saving money. You can turn that burner down. You’re going to keep that simmer going most of the day, with a really low heat on cast iron.”
Despite the frontier flair, Rollins insists cowboy cooking is for everyone.
“You can cook anything I ever cooked in my life — in the house, outside, on top of the house, in the barn,” he said. It’s “all simple” and “all easy.”
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“That’s what life is about for us and that’s what cooking is,” he said.
“Because you can’t get full-on fancy.”
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