Swap The Meat In Your Chili With Sweet Potatoes For An Easy Vegetarian Upgrade

If you've recently swapped out a meat-eater's diet for more plant-based fare, then you know the struggle is real when it comes to finding a good chili recipe. If you're fortunate, though, you've already stumbled upon hearty and tasty substitutes like sweet potatoes. Sweet potato chili is a switch that will tickle your tastebuds just as much as your once-favored slow cooker beef chili recipe did.

To create a flavor-packed punch, dice up one or two sweet potatoes. Saute the spuds in oil in the chili pot, along with aromatic vegetables such as garlic, onion, bell peppers, and celery. Seasonings like cumin, chili powder, smoked paprika, salt, and pepper are added after the sweet potatoes are cooked. Make sure you coat the potatoes and the aromatic veggies thoroughly with the seasonings to get the most potent flavor. Vegetable broth, diced tomatoes, and canned beans, in tandem with the sweet potatoes, provide the liquid needed to soften the spuds completely and to add even more bulk to the dish. Depending on the recipe you use, your vegetarian or vegan chili needs to cook between 30 to 45 minutes before you serve it.

Swapping out sweet potatoes for meat means missing the flavor of fatty hamburger in tomato sauce many associate with chili. But it's also true that many of the meat substitutes on the market come pretty close in flavor to the real thing. They also have plenty of additives and are highly processed, though, so if you went plant-based because you hope to avoid these things in your diet, your vegetarian chili may be a disappointment.

It doesn't have to be this way, though. Enter walnuts, sun-dried tomatoes, canned tomatoes, and soy sauce. Many vegetarians make a vegan Bolognese sauce with faux meat built from those ingredients, with the walnuts and mushrooms being particularly key. The same principle applies to chili. These ingredients, used together, make a "meatier" chili that effectively mimics the meat-laden dish's taste.

Grind up the walnuts in the food processor to create the texture of ground beef. Mushrooms, when cooked, also have the mouthfeel of meat, and if they're marinated in soy sauce, they take on a burst of beef-esque umami flavor. As for the other ingredients, the oils and flavors in the sun-dried tomatoes, mixed with canned crushed and diced tomatoes, are enough to fool the tongue into thinking that it's tasting chili meat. This is particularly true if the recipe is seasoned with traditional chili spices, like cumin, chili powder, and smoked paprika.

One of the difficulties of adopting a plant-based diet is excessive hunger, due to many vegan and vegetarian meals having less fat. Of all the things in your diet, fat is the last nutrient out of the stomach and intestines. In other words, fat takes longer to digest than other foods, and therefore increases feelings of satiety. Meats, and meat-laden dishes like chili, are rich in these fats, which make you feel pleasantly full and lend delicious flavors to the meal.

But this doesn't mean you can't get the same satiety and flavor from your vegetarian chili. Adding bulky veggies and some plant-based fats to a basic vegetarian chili allows you to feel just as satisfied as you would be eating a beef chili. Plus, you get to enjoy all the rich, complex flavors of seasonal vegetables. Try veggies like zucchini, eggplant, cauliflower, white potatoes, carrots, and corn in your next pot of vegetarian chili. To replace the animal fats, add slices of avocado or faux sour cream made from raw cashews. With all those garden-fresh flavors on your spoon, your vegan chili will, without a doubt, impress all who taste it.