Autumn is the perfect time to try out a new delicious chili recipe in your pressure cooker. If you have a big enough pressure cooker and a great recipe, you can make enough to feed a whole house of hangry people. Nothing will make your company happier than a warm home-cooked meal to help away from the feelings of the cold weather that lingers outside.

Most people know about slow cooker chili recipes and stovetop chili recipes, but how often have you tried pressure cooker chili? Slow cookers make succulent chilis, but they take a long time. When you use a pressure cooker, it creates the same taste as a slow cooker would, but in substantially less time.

Follow this award-winning chili recipe with your pressure cooker and feel free to make some adjustments in spices and ingredients to make the recipe appeal better to your taste buds. Keep reading past the recipe to view some substitutions you can make to account for allergies and dietary preferences.

Award-Winning Instant Pot Chili Recipe (with Bacon)

This award-winning pressure cooker chili is super simple to prep, and it can take as little as 35 minutes to cook.

To view the original recipe by ohsweetbasil.com and its nutrition facts – click here.

Ingredients You’ll Need

Step-by-Step Cooking Instructions

These instructions can be for any pressure cooker, but the settings mentioned are for Instant Pot pressure cookers, specifically. If you do not want to add bacon in your chili, skip steps 1 and 2, and go straight to adding the onions and pepper on the sauté setting.

1. Put your Instant Pot Pressure Cooker on the sauté setting. Add your chopped bacon and cook it while stirring continuously. Continue cooking the bacon until it is crispy and cooked thoroughly.
2. Once it is done, remove the bacon from the pressure cooker pot and place it on a paper towel-lined plate. Gently pat the bacon with another paper towel to absorb the grease. Do not turn off the pressure cooker.
3. Next, add your chopped onion and bell pepper to the pressure cooker. Cook until both of the ingredients are tender.
4. Keeping the onion and pepper in the pressure cooker, add the ground beef. Cook the meat well until it is brown. Drain the grease after.
5. Add the remaining ingredients, including the bacon. Stir.
6. Turn your Instant Pot to the Chili setting and cook for 18-20 minutes. Once the time is complete, allow the pressure to release for at least 10 minutes before removing the lid. This cooling time will also allow the chili to thicken a bit.
7. Serve immediately with your choice of toppings.

Chili Ingredient Substitutions

The terrific thing about making chili is that you can change almost every ingredient and still consider it chili. This chili recipe is super delicious, but there are several ingredients you can switch out if you have allergies or dietary preferences. Everyone desires to enjoy this dish. Let’s go over a few of the optional substitutions:

Vegetarian Chili Ingredients

Vegetarian chili is super popular because it is so easy to change a meat chili recipe into a just-as-delicious vegetarian dish. With this specific recipe, you can leave out the bacon and beef, and either replace them with your favorite meat substitute or add potatoes and vegetables. Corn is a nice addition, as well.

For the beef broth, substitute vegetable broth, and if you want to maintain some meat flavoring without the actual meat, you can use bouillon or extra spices like celery salt and poultry seasoning.

Onion Allergy Substitution

Onion allergies are very common, so you may want to substitute your red onion ingredient to avoid the risk of an allergic reaction in one of your guests. Instead of adding red onion, use extra salt and garlic or fennel, which has a similar texture and pungy taste to an onion.

What Is the Best Pressure Cooker for Chili?

This recipe is for the Instant Pot Pressure Cooker. Instant Pot is one of the best modern-day electric pressure cookers. Many older pressure cooker brands like Presto, T-fal, and All American are super reliable as well; although, you may prefer the elaborate cook settings that come on new pressure cookers.

Generally, chili is easiest to make in newer electric pressure cookers and multicookers because they allow you to switch settings quickly and customize the pressure level. And if you buy the right multicooker, you can pressure cook or slow cook in it.

More About This Recipe

The “Instant Pot Award Winning Chili Recipe” is an original family recipe from the website, Oh, Sweet Basil. You can view their recipe here.

If you follow the recipe exactly and use the same ingredients, one serving of this chili should have about 459 calories, 1110mg of Sodium, 21g of fat, and 36g of protein. A full nutrition facts label is on the original source website. These amounts will change with any substitutions you make, but a multiplied amount will not affect it as long as you multiply every ingredient by the same amount.

Try making other chili recipes with your pressure cooker and see which one you like the best. With pressure cooking recipes, it is extraordinarily easy to customize the ingredients and seasonings since most of those recipes cook everything all at once.

Explore all the different settings and cooking presets on your Instant Pot; there are all sorts of capabilities with them and countless types of recipes you can make.