Top Tips for Tasty and Healthy Vegetarian Chili

If Meghan Trainor is “All About That Bass,” then chili is all about those spices.

You can mix and match, try new ones, and have an all-around creative time finding new and exciting flavor profiles. Common chili seasonings include some very healthy spices like chili pepper, black pepper, paprika, garlic, and onion (fresh, powdered, and granulated), as well as cumin.

Two flavorings that you may want to watch out for, though, are sugar and salt. Many chili recipes add sugar or other sweeteners to balance out the spiciness. Many of the ICS cookoff winners rely heavily on sugar to please the judges, but if you’re generally consuming a low-sugar diet, you can easily cut the amount of sweetener in mainstream chili recipes by half or more and still find them delicious.

In addition to the large quantities of salt that many recipes call for, canned beans themselves may be high in sodium. If you like, you can mitigate this by omitting extra salt, rinsing the canned beans, or cooking your own dried beans from scratch.

Speaking of beans, that’s another area for creative experimentation. There’s a long tradition of beans in chili, no matter what the ICS says. You can find 3-bean and 10-bean chilis, and you can combine beans of similar size in recipes so they all cook to the same level of doneness. Different varieties of beans can enhance the nutritional profile of chili, as they each contain different combinations and amounts of nutrients including protein and amino acids, fiber, vitamins, and minerals.

Veggie chilis with lots of different beans can also look beautiful, especially if you include colorful heirloom varieties like scarlet runner, cranberry, yellow eye, and black and white vaquero beans. Different beans will also contribute different textures and flavors to your chili, of course.

https://foodrevolution.org/blog/veggie-chili-recipes/?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=blo-2022&utm_content=chili-recipes