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When we were menu planning for last year’s Super Bowl, we thought a turkey & bean chili sounded like a great option … if only the typical chili recipe wasn’t so high in calories and fat.

Rather that come up with another option, I thought I’d create a chili recipe of my own. To do so, I just looked at my favorite chili recipes and tried to determine which parts of the recipes were the most quintessential to the “chili” experience and which were just bringing those unnecessary fats and calories to the party.

This resulting recipe, I believe, eats like a traditional turkey & bean chili, but with with 4 grams of fat and nearly 40% fewer calories (175 for 1 cup) than your typical chili recipe. Plus, it’s a slow cooker recipe which is simply to make! So whether you make it for the big game, or just for a cold winter night… give it a try and let me know what you think!

Ingredients (Makes 10 Cups)

• 1 large yellow onion
• 1 Red Bell Pepper
• 1 Green Bell Pepper
• Ground Turkey (1 lb)
• Red Kidney Beans (1 can, drained)
• Black Beans (1/2 of a 15.5 oz can, drained)
• 3 cans (14.5 oz) petite diced tomatoes
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2 tbsp chili powder
• 1 tbsp dried oregano
• 1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1 tsp ground cumin

Chop, Chop (Initial Prep)

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The first step is the most (and only) tedious part of the whole process. Begin by chopping both the onion and the peppers into small 1/2 inch squares. It’s a chili recipe and the slow cooker will smooth out a lot of rough spots if need be, so don’t fret if all your pieces are not precisely the same size… just do your best to get a routine cut on all the peppers, and on the onion.

A Bit of Pre-Cooking

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While this is a slow-cooker recipe, we do need to start out with a bit of cooking on the stove top. In a large pan (either non-stick, or a pan using cooking spray — not oil nor butter… no need to add unnecessary fat & calories) begin by cooking the onion on high heat for 2-3 minutes until softened and slightly browned.

The goal here is two-fold. You’re “taking the edge off” the onions and you’re flavoring the pan by releasing some of the juices of the onion. Once that is done, dump the onion into the slow cooker and return the pan to the stove top. Do NOT wipe the pan out.

Next, brown the ground turkey in that same pan, again over high high, seasoning with salt and pepper while you do so. The goal is to cook the meat thoroughly and break it up into small pieces. When it is just cooked, the pan may have a great deal of liquid in it. If so, cook for another 30 seconds or so until some of that evaporates. You don’t want the meat over cooked, but you don’t want to too wet. So just monitor.

Once that is done, add it to the slow cooker with the onions.

Everyone Else In the Pool

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After the cooked onion and ground turkey are in the slow cooker, it’s time to add the remaining ingredients. Add your already cut up peppers. Dump in the three cans of petite diced tomatoes. Drain and rinse the kidney beans and the 1/2 can of black beans and add them as well. And then add the remainder of the listed ingredients – the red wine vinegar, cocoa, chili powder, cumin, oregano, and garlic. And then salt and pepper to taste. If you used salt/pepper when cooking the turkey, I’d recommend 1 tsp of salt and 1/2 tsp of black pepper added here, but you could do less if you prefer, and wait for a few hours until you taste it and then decide. It’s very much a personal preference. Once everything is in, give it a nice big stir until the spices are well distributed.

To Spice or Not to Spice

This recipe is very flavorful. You could, because of all the chili powder, even call it “spicy” in one form of the word. But what it is not is HOT. So if you like your chili to bring the heat? That’s something you can certainly add at this point. A little bit, for example, of ground cayenne pepper will go a long way to adding to the heat quotient and will not impact the nutrition at all. Just be cautious, as, just like with salt, you can’t UN-spice something. So take it slow if you’re going this route.

Cooking Time

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Since you fully cooked the ground turkey, once everything comes up to temp, technically this would be “done.” But in reality, you want to give the ingredients time to develop flavor in the slow cooker. Six hours at low heat, or four hours at high heat would be the least amount of time I’d recommend. Optimally, I’d say 6-8 hours on low is the way to go.

When done, it should yield at least 10 cups of chili… with 1 cup being a standard serving.

Variations

One of the great things about turkey & bean chili is, once you’ve got a basic recipe down, you can adjust it to your individual tastes with relative ease. As mentioned above, you can certainly play with the spice level by adding heat.

Some people don’t consider a bowl of chili to be “a bowl of chili” without some melted cheese on top of it. If so? It will add calories, but look for some reduced fat shredded cheddar cheese and add 1 tablespoon just before serving. You want sharp cheese so you’ll taste it, and you want to add it just as you’re about to eat it, so you get the maximum impact on your senses of the gooey orange cheese (might as well make those calories worth it!)

A final option (pictured below). I used to love serving chili over noodles. Well that doesn’t work with my current weight loss plan, so I decided to try chopping up some cauliflower in to small, elbow macaroni sized pieces and slightly roasting them (10-15 minutes) to get that “al dente” texture. Then I put a cup of the cauliflower “noodles” in the bowl, followed by a serving of the chili. For the additional 30 calories that the cauliflower added it became a meal almost too big to finish!

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