Slow Cooker Chili Recipe

We absolutely love this slow cooker chili recipe! It is a thick and hearty chili that will warm your bones on a cold winter day.

But the best part of all is that it is a true dump and go recipe. Simply dump all the ingredients in your slow cooker and walk away.

Once you are ready to eat, open the lid and serve! There are no extra steps required. Well, except maybe topping your chili off with a little cheese!

How To Make Slow Cooker Chili

However, there are a couple of hints to make this slow cooker chili recipe even better!

First, you must brown your ground meat before adding it to your slow cooker. And we say ground meat because you can use either beef, sausage, turkey or even ground chicken for this recipe. Or a combination of them all!

This is because most of the flavor is going to come from the other ingredients. Therefore, feel free to make this slow cooker chili a little healthier by using turkey or chicken if you wish.

However, I prefer a combination of beef, chicken and spicy sausage in our chili.

And if you do any type of meal prep, you can even throw frozen, cooked, ground meat in the slow cooker as well.

Next, we prefer to use a red bell pepper instead of the standard green variety. The sweeter pepper adds a great balance of flavor to the chili seasoning.

How to Season Your Chili

And speaking of chili seasoning, we use a combination of spices to make this slow cooker chili recipe.

In addition to the standard chili seasoning (or our homemade version), we also add in a little garlic powder, onion powder and cumin. This adds depths of flavor to your slow cooker chili recipe that most recipes don’t include.

And one final difference from this chili recipe is that we use two different types of beans.

First, we use standard, chili kidney beans. You can choose either a mild or spicy variety.

But we also use black beans in this recipe. However, we do drain most of the liquid out of the can before adding the black beans to the slow cooker chili recipe.

On the contrary, we dump the entire can of chili kidney beans in the pot. This is because we want the flavor of the chili bean sauce but not the black bean sauce.

Then all that is left to do is turn on your slow cooker and wait for the chili to cook!

We love our programmable Crock Pot Slow Cooker that will cook your chili for the time required and then automatically turn to a Keep Warm setting. That way you don’t have to worry about cooking the chili too long if your day gets busy or you get home later than you thought!

Enjoy!

Mary and Jim

Jim and Mary Competti have been writing gardening, DIY and recipe articles and books for over 15 years from their 46 acre Ohio farm. The two are frequent speakers on all things gardening and love to travel in their spare time.

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