Slow Cooker Beef Chilli
The same dish as a hob chilli with one thing rewritten: nothing evaporates in a slow cooker, so the liquid is halved from the start rather than boiled away at the end.
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 7 hr
- Total
- 7 hr 25 min
- Serves
- 6
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Celery
- Sulphites
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Chilli paste
Chilli
To finish
Method
Chilli paste
Toast the dried chillies in a dry pan for 45 seconds a side until they smell of raisins, then soak them in the boiling water for 20 minutes.
Blend the softened chillies with 150ml of the soaking water and keep the rest for later, in case the pot needs loosening.
Chilli
Heat the oil in a frying pan and brown the mince hard in three batches, transferring each to the slow cooker as it is done.
Browning is the one step a slow cooker cannot do for you. Raw mince tipped straight in gives a pot the colour of weak tea, and nothing over seven hours will put back what was skipped in ten minutes.
Cook the onions in the same pan for 8 minutes, add the garlic, cumin, oregano, paprika and tomato purée and stir for 2 minutes until the purée darkens.
Scrape all of it into the slow cooker with the chilli paste, the tomatoes, the stock and the salt.
Note that this is about half the liquid a hob version takes. A slow cooker is a sealed box: almost nothing evaporates, so the liquid you start with is roughly the liquid you finish with, and a recipe written for a hob will give you soup.
Stir well, cover and cook on low for 6 hours.
Add the beans and cook for a further hour.
To finish
If it is looser than you want, take the lid off and turn it to high for the last 30 minutes.
Stir in the lime juice and taste for salt, which it will need.
Serve with rice, soured cream and coriander.
Nobody has rated this recipe yet.
Sign in to rate this recipe. One rating per person, and you can change it.
What to expect
- Taste
Sweet, smoky and savoury, and slightly softer than the hob version — long gentle heat rounds edges off where an open simmer concentrates them. It needs more salt and more acid at the end than the hob version does, for the same reason.
- Aroma
Builds all day rather than arriving. The smell of a house with a slow cooker running is most of the appeal of owning one.
- Texture
Softer and more uniform than a hob chilli. Everything has had seven hours to give up its structure, which is a pleasant thing here and a problem in a dish with vegetables in it.
- Sound
None at all. A slow cooker is silent, which is what makes it easy to forget how long it has been on.
- How the flavour moves
Sweet fruit from the ancho, then smoke, then a heat that builds slowly. Lime at the end is doing more work here than in the hob version.
- Serve it
Hot, with cold soured cream on top.
- Goes with
Rice, cornbread, a baked potato. Soured cream and raw onion are structural.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Easy.
- Cost
Low.
- Equipment
A slow cooker and a frying pan. The frying pan is the part people try to skip.
- When to make it
A working day. Ten minutes at each end.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
Thick enough that a spoon leaves a channel, with fat at the edges. If it looks like soup at seven hours, the liquid was wrong at the start rather than the cooking being wrong.
- And it feels like
Soft grains of meat in a thick sauce, beans whole.
- Food safety
The specific slow cooker risk is a long slow warm-up rather than the cooking itself. Do not put frozen meat in a slow cooker, do not fill it more than two-thirds, brown the meat first — which this recipe does anyway — and cool leftovers in shallow containers rather than leaving the crock out. The crock itself holds heat for hours and is not a cooling vessel.
- Where it goes wrong
- Using a hob recipe's quantity of liquid, which is the reason slow cooker stews are famously thin.
- Skipping the browning to save washing up, which costs the dish its colour and most of its depth.
- Adding beans at the start, where seven hours reduces them to paste.
- Filling the pot more than two-thirds, which stops it reaching temperature safely.
- Under-seasoning at the end. Gentle cooking mutes salt and acid and both need topping up.
- If it does go wrong
Thin: lid off, high, 30 to 45 minutes, or stir in a slurry of a tablespoon of cornflour in cold water. Pale: it was not browned. Flat: salt, then lime, in that order.
- Making it ahead
Better the next day, like every chilli.
- Keeping it
Four days in the fridge and better for it.
- Reheating
A pan on low with a splash of water.
- Freezing
Three months. Excellent.
- Leftovers
Baked potatoes, nachos, or a chilli cottage pie.
- Scaling it
Constrained by the pot, not the recipe.
- Substitutions
Guajillo for ancho. Half the mince replaced by a drained tin of black beans works well in a slow cooker, which is gentle enough to leave them whole.
- Dietary swaps
Celery and sulphites come from shop-bought stock and disappear with a stock that has neither. Gluten free, dairy free without soured cream, egg free and nut free.
- Shopping for it
Dried chillies from an international grocer.
- Keeping the cost down
Halving the mince and adding a third tin of beans is barely detectable here and cuts the cost substantially.
- Sustainability
Beef is the heaviest thing in it. A slow cooker is unusually forgiving of a bean-heavy version, because it will not break the beans up the way a hard simmer does — 450g of mince with a third tin of beans is a genuinely good dish rather than a compromise. On energy, a slow cooker draws very little power and running one for seven hours generally uses less than an oven for one.
- Nutrition
High protein and high fibre from the beans.
- Worth it?
One number changed from the hob recipe, and it is the number that decides whether this works.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Texas for the dish, the 1970s for the appliance.
- Also called
Chilli con carne.
- Said out loud
CHIL-ee kon KAR-nay.
- What the name means
Chilli with meat.
- History
The dish's history belongs to San Antonio and the Chili Queens who sold it in the plazas from the 1880s. The slow cooker itself descends from the Naxon Beanery, an electric bean cooker bought and relaunched by Rival as the Crock-Pot in 1971, and its rapid adoption in American homes is bound up with women entering paid work in larger numbers and needing dinner to cook itself.
- Why it matters
Chilli is a Texan point of pride and a global household staple, and the slow cooker is the appliance most associated with cooking while absent.
- When it is eaten
A working day, or a house full of people arriving at unpredictable times.
- The traditional way
Dried chillies rehydrated and ground, long slow cooking.
- How it changed
The pot changed, and the liquid had to change with it. Very little else did.
- Regional variations
As with the hob version: Texan chilli has no beans and no tomato, Cincinnati chilli is served on spaghetti, and the British version is this one.
- How this version differs
Half the liquid of the hob recipe on this site, and the mince browned in a pan first. Both are corrections to what slow cooker recipes usually say. The two recipes are the same dish and it is worth cooking whichever suits the day rather than treating one as the real one.
- Sources and credit
None.
Chilli con Carne
Slow Cooker Beef Stew
Beef and Ale Stew with Herb Dumplings
Beef Tacos
Classic Beef Burger
Curry Goat
American
Stews
Main courses
Beef