World’s Easiest Vegetarian Pantry Chili

This quick-to-make vegetarian pantry chili calls for what I’d normally say is too many cans. But you know what, it’s nice to a have a pantry full of healthy canned food at the ready. Even if you’ve never boiled water, you can make this easy meatless chili.

Click here to PIN Easy Vegetarian Pantry Chili!

How to make Vegetarian Pantry Chili:

This vegetarian pantry chili starts with chopped onions sautéed until soft.

While the onions cook, you drain and rinse the contents of 3 cans, one each of black, pinto, kidney beans. Don’t stop there. Open a can of hominy corn. Open a can of diced green chiles. Add a can of diced tomatoes. Lastly, add a can (or jar) of salsa.

Stir everything into the pot of onions. Add cumin and chili powder. Stir in some vegetable broth–more or less, to make your chili as thin or thick as you like. Let it simmer on the stove for half an hour. Olé–you have a flavorful one-pot vegetarian chili.

This quick and easy chili is more than you’d expect for a dinner that comes almost entirely from cans. So, grab a can opener, an onion, and a couple spices–you’ve got this!

What’s in the pantry?

• Open our pantry and you’ll always find more than one can of beans. They’re right next to glass jars of dried beans. Even though canned beans are wicked handy, if I have the time, I prefer to cook beans from scratch.
• In fact, the most popular recipes here on the blog are beans cooked in a pressure cooker. Like “How to cook black beans in a pressure cooker“, “How to pressure cook pinto beans”, and “How to pressure cook chickpeas.”
• Beans from scratch do taste much better than the ones in a can. And the pressure cooker or Instant Pot makes scratch beans freaking easy. Even easier, though–canned beans!
• Green chiles and red salsa, they’re pantry regulars around here too. You’ll like this easy pressure cooker risotto with chard, pinto beans and green chiles.
• I keep toothy hominy in the pantry for butternut squash pozole. This pozole is my vegetarian riff on classic Mexican pozole. Make it fast in your pressure cooker or Instant Pot.
• Canned diced tomatoes, always in the cupboard, ready for minestrone soup.
• If you like your chili less thick–add an (5.5-ounce) can of V8 juice. What’s another can in a quick recipe with canned ingredients? I buy V8 to have on hand for this tangy Red Wine Tomato Salad Dressing.

Vegetarian Pantry Chili recipe tips, substitutions and stuff:

• We garnished our chili with a sprinkle of grated white cheddar cheese. To really dress it up, you garnish with sour cream and green onions.
• Keep it vegan: Top your chili with a few slices of avocado.
• I used medium-hot salsa. If your picante tolerance is high, choose a “hotter” salsa. You could use green salsa, if that’s what you have in your pantry.
• Hominy brings in toothsome texture and color contrast, but if you don’t have hominy, substitute frozen corn. Or rinsed and drained canned corn. Another can! 😄
• Look for canned hominy (affiliate link) in the grocery store section with Mexican foods, like the chiles and salsa.

Last week, the store was out of kidney beans. No worries, I just used a second can of pintos in this recipe. As in, If you don’t have 3 kinds of beans for this pantry chili, just sub in what you have.

More home-cooking inspiration:

• Use the reserved hominy in greens and potato soup with hominy and pinto beans.
• Chili is delicious over baked potatoes!
• To go with any hearty chili, make these chard and pepper jack quesadillas.
• One more idea: Made with dried beans in the pressure cooker, this spicy black bean chili with hearty greens.

This recipe is adapted from the 30-minute confetti chili in Jessica Fisher’s cookbook, Good Cheap Eats Dinner in 30 Minutes (or Less! (Affiliate link.) This is an update of an older post, a review of her cookbook.

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Nutrition information is meant to be an estimate only. The numbers will vary based on the brands you use and substitutions you made, as well as how much chili you actually eat.