This 10-Ingredient Chicken Chili Feeds A Crowd — and Uses Dried Beans (No Soak Required!)

Although I am firmly of the belief that the internet needs another recipe for chicken crockpot chili like your groggy narrator needs another morning of her mini-humans rousing her before 6 a.m., when I went to make my own one night, I was dissatisfied with what I found. It wasn’t because recipes out there weren’t good, or well-reviewed and certainly not because they hadn’t made countless other people out there content at mealtimes, but because they weren’t what I was looking for. And, well, as that’s how we got here in the first place, it seems appropriate enough to step into the year 2016, the year this website turns ten, not fighting this at all.

what you'll need, minus the broth

While I’m hardly aspiring towards the Texas Gold Standard of chile con carne — chunks of beef, lots of chiles, and ftlog, no beans — I think there’s something to a fairly straightforward, excellently-seasoned chili. I could overlook the instant tapioca, jars of salsa, cinnamon, chocolate, onion powder, garlic powder, taco seasoning mix and celery on the front page of Google’s results that might be someone’s thing, just not mine, but I kept getting stuck on one point: if we’re going to run the slow-cooker for 5 or 10 hours, or simmer a chili on the stove for 3, why start with canned beans? Dried beans are more economical, more flavorful and will plump up splendidly in either of those cooking times without any presoaking nonsense.

And so I had to fiddle up my own recipe. I made a hasty pot of chicken chili in the hazy newborn days this summer because I hadn’t then or now shaken this obsessive need to only consume meals that can be eaten on or with tortillas, and everyone declared it the best dinner in a long time. I hadn’t expected this; it was food for convenience, for ease — mustn’t it then taste like compromise?

The leftovers were grand, too, and from there, I couldn’t stop. When my husband had to go to Germany for work in November and I was quietly fur-reaking out over how I was going to single parent when I am barely cut out for coparenting most days, I set up another pot and boom, two nights of wholesome dinner were set. I made it a few weeks ago when Thanksgiving pies were weighing heavily on our midsections, and I made it again yesterday when we’d finished off the weekend’s potato kugel and baked Lorraine-ish omelet and oh-god-don’t-even-find-out-how-good-these-are-they’re-just-going-to-ruin-everything sticky bun brunch and were, at last, all set on butter and cream for a while. Did you hear that? Eight times we’ve had this in two months, and we’re not even tired of it yet. I hope you find this equally worthy of repetition.

At-a-glance

Ingredients

(I have always wanted to write recipe instructions just like this!) Throw everything in the pot and turn the heat on:

On the stove: Simmer the ingredients on low until the beans are tender, about 2½ to 3 hours. Stir occasionally.

In a slow-cooker: Cook on HIGH for 4½ to 5 hours or on LOW for 8 to 10 hours.

In an Instant Pot or electric pressure-cooker: Cook at high pressure for 30 minutes; a manual release works fine. This timing is for small beans (small red and regular black beans). If you’re using larger beans you may need about 35 minutes.

To finish:

The chicken will likely have fallen apart, but you can help it along by using two forks to shred it to your preferred texture. (In a pressure cooker this is often unnecessary; you can break the chicken up with the back of a spoon.) Taste and adjust the seasonings, then serve with the fixings you like.

P.S. We like this with baked tortilla chips. I estimate two small corn tortillas per person; cut each into 8 wedges. Brush a large baking sheet lightly with olive oil, arrange the tortilla wedges in a single layer, lightly dab the tops with more olive oil and sprinkle with fine salt. Bake at 350°F for about 10 minutes, check for color, and add more time as needed until they’re golden and crisp.

Troubleshooting:

It sounds like some people are having trouble getting their dried beans to cook in the suggested times. I’m sorry for that—that’s frustrating. I tested this recipe with different beans (Rancho Gordo and Goya) and with different slow-cookers (an older Farberware and a Proctor-Silex) and never had trouble; I’m beginning to suspect my slow-cooker runs hotter than others. That offers little consolation to readers with undercooked beans.

So, to troubleshoot: If you’ve struggled in the past getting dried beans to soften in a slow-cooker, go ahead and soak them overnight first. Soak them in the 5⅓ cups of water and then use that same water—now flavored by the beans—in your slow-cooker. This also helps ensure you have the correct final liquid level, since it’s hard to predict exactly how much water the beans will absorb.

A note about kidney beans:

I do not use kidney beans in this recipe, but rather small red beans; I generally don’t presoak my beans. However, if you are using red kidney beans, be aware that they contain a protein called phytohaemagglutinin. The FDA advises that if you plan to cook kidney beans in a slow-cooker you should first soak the beans for at least 5 hours, discard that water, boil the beans in fresh water for 10 minutes, and then continue with the recipe. Because soaked beans have already absorbed liquid, you may need less additional liquid during the final cooking. Regarding how worried you should be, the FDA notes that reports of poisoning from this protein in the United States are anecdotal and not formally published, and most concerns date back to reports from the late 1970s in the U.K.

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