Instructions
- Heat oil in a wok or sauté pan. Cook garlic, onion, beef, bacon, and cayenne pepper, stirring, until beef cooks.
- Add celery and carrots. Stirring for 1 minute.
- Transfer mixture to slow cooker.
- Stir in tomato paste, chili powder, pasta sauce, sugar, stock, and beans.
- Cook on low for 8 hours, covered.
- Season to taste.
Slow Cooked Chili Beans is a hearty, low-effort chili built around ground beef and bacon, a combo that gives it a deeper, smokier savoriness than beef alone would. Browning both together with garlic, onion, and fresh cayenne on the stovetop first is what really builds the base flavor and also cooks the meat through properly before it goes into the slow cooker, so nothing sits half-cooked over that long stretch.
Once the aromatics, carrot, and celery are stirred in, everything shifts to the slow cooker where tomato paste, pasta sauce, chicken stock, brown sugar, and white beans simmer together for eight hours on low. That long, unhurried cook is really the point, letting the flavors of the beef, bacon, and fresh cayenne meld fully into the tomato base while the beans soften and soak up all that savory-sweet sauce rather than staying separate from it. Brown sugar takes some of the sharp edge off the tomato and chili powder, while the cayenne keeps a real, noticeable heat running through the dish rather than a mild background warmth. What comes out after all those hours is a thick, well-developed chili, smoky from the bacon, spicy from the cayenne, and rounded out just enough by the sugar, the kind of dish built to be started in the morning and ready without any more work by dinner.
Notes
You can serve it with pasta, roasted potatoes, or rice.