Slow Cooker Chili - Easy Crockpot Chili Recipe! (2024)

Recipe

Slow Cooker Chili – this recipe is so easy to make and really requires no advanced cooking skills! I love that you can you can more or less dump everything in your Crockpot, give it a quick stir and come back hours later to a wonderfully tasty weeknight dinner, it doesn’t get any better than that!

My Slow Cooker chili recipe has been tweaked, tested and tasted to create a really flavorful Crockpot chili that you can further adapt to suit your own tastebuds.

I’ve used crushed fire roasted tomatoes in my recipe as I think it really adds a little something extra to this recipe and it’s worth trying over regular canned tomatoes.

How to Cook Slow Cooker Chili

Start by browning your beef in a seasoned cast iron or similar non stick skillet. If you have very lean beef you may need to add a little oil but if you have ground beef with 10% fat or more and your skillet really is non stick you can probably get away with not adding any oil at all. (This post contains affiliate links)

Once you’ve browned the ground beef add it to your Crockpot along with the chopped onions, garlic, Ancho Chili powder, cumin, oregano and cayenne pepper.

Then you’ll need to add the red kidney beans, gluten free beef broth, crushed fire roasted tomatoes and tomato sauce and give it a good stir to let the flavors mix together. If you don’t like kidney beans you can substitute Pinto beans instead.

Once it’s mixed it may look a little thick, that’s ok as it will create more liquid and juice as it cooks. If you like really ‘saucey’ chili you can always add more tomato sauce or chopped tomatoes, but you may also need to increase the seasonings to compensate.

Put the lid on and cook your slow cooker chili for 3-4 hours on HIGH or 6-7 hours on LOW. I have an old Crockpot that does not run as hot as the newer models (I think they changed the regulations over the minimum cooking heat) and so it takes longer to cook than my newer slow cooker so you will just need to check in after a few hours to see how your chili is doing.

The cook time for this recipe is not an exact science and will be different based on your own slow cooker as I mentioned above, and also your own personal preference for how ‘done’ you like your chili to be.

Once it’s cooked to your satisfaction you can taste it and add salt and pepper to taste.

I didn’t add salt to the recipe before the end of the cook time as beef broths and canned tomato products can be quite salty already depending on the brand.

Some in my family like a much hotter chili so you can also add in more cayenne pepper to get the desired heat level you want, and feel free to increase the ancho chili powder, cumin and other seasonings, it’s really a quite forgiving recipe and you can tweak it to suit your family.

More Easy Dinner Recipes

• Pot Roast Tacos
• Paleo Pot Roast
• Weeknight Paleo Meatloaf
• Honey Mustard Chicken