Dave MacAuley (left) holds a bowl of the Prince Albert Firefighters' Association's award winning chili following the Prince Albert Winter Festival's second annual chili cookoff at the P.A. Exhibition Centre on Feb. 4, 2026. (Image Credit: Logan Lehmann/paNOW Staff)

By Logan Lehmann

Bringing the heat

P.A. firefighters win Winter Festival’s chili cookoff

Feb 4, 2026 | 3:11 PM

The Prince Albert Firefighters’ Association took home top prize at the Winter Festival’s second annual chili cookoff. 

The event was the first of many planned festivities over the course of the month for the festival’s 62nd installment and was held inside the Prince Albert Exhibition Centre on Wednesday. 

Firefighter Dave MacAuley said it felt great to take home first after falling short last year.  

“We came in last year, unfortunately didn’t have a very strong showing, didn’t place. We put some ideas together this year and we really wanted to win, and all that hard work paid off.” 

The firefighters knocked off the reigning champions in the Northern Lights Casino, alongside the other competitors including the P.A. Exhibition Association, Selena’s Donair, Pattison Media, and the First Nations University. Winning second place was Boston Pizza with their pepperoni pizza chili, and coming in third was the Coronet Hotel with their tropical inspired chili. 

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For the firefighters, they went with a classic Texas Southern style chili that had an eight-ingredient base with nine different spices. According to MacAuley, the thing that put their chili above the others was the different meats that they used and how they cooked the chili itself. 

“Ground beef, sausage, and then we slow smoked a beef roast, and that just gave it a completely different flavour,” he explained, adding there were four members a part of the team that made the chili “Once all of the ingredients were mixed together, we then smoked it for over 20 hours on the smoker in two batches. That gave it a really unique flavour, I think, on top of everybody that was here today.” 

The chili also won the coveted Judge’s Choice award. 

He continued that for next year, they’re going to take their winning recipe back to the lab to make it even better for the 2027 festival. 

“It was really successful for us, but we might try to tweak it a little bit just to have a little bit of originality. I think we’ve definitely created something here that we don’t want to stray too far from.” 

The Prince Albert Winter Festival continues on Friday night with the Country North Show at the P.A. Exhibition Centre, starting at 7 p.m. A full calendar of events throughout the month can be found by clicking here. 

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loganc.lehmann@pattisonmedia.com