Gluten Free Instant Pot Pumpkin Chili (Bean Free)

Chilly evenings call for a hot and filling bowl of chili! Our Instant Pot Pumpkin Chili is easy to make, gluten free, dairy free, and healthy. It’s also lower in acid than most chili recipes and has no beans so it’s perfect for sensitive tummies.

One of our favorite foods in the fall and winter months is a bowl of hot chili, but we don’t cook it very often since our family (mostly me) has food intolerances that make chili harder for us make.

Since large quantities of cooked tomatoes are problematic for me for some reason and I can’t have beans either, most traditional chili recipes are not something I can have. So we came up with our own version of chili that’s lower in acid and bean-free.

I had some fun looking at the different regional chilis around America and laughed a little when I saw the Rocky Mountain chili. Ours looks nothing like it that all, but the description is fairly accurate for our area, especially the part about wild game instead of beef.

In this recipe we used a little bit of tomato sauce but most of our chili base is made with pumpkin rather than tomatoes so it helps to cut down the acid a bit if you can’t have a lot of cooked tomatoes or you have problems with reflux and high acid foods.

You can even cut out the tomatoes completely in here if you’d like! Make adjustments to this recipe as needed, just don’t add the canned pumpkin to the pot before cooking (I’ll explain more about why in my recipe notes).

We actually made a really yummy stovetop pumpkin chili recipe years ago that I love, but the buffalo ground chicken I used in that recipe isn’t available in my local stores anymore so we can’t make that exact recipe anymore.

How to make Instant Pot pumpkin chili

Our Instant Pot chili is pretty straightforward and easy to make. Not too many steps here!

1. Brown the ground beef (or other ground meat) and garlic in the pressure cooker set to brown/saute.
2. Add to the pressure cooker the green chili sauce, butternut squash, beef broth, and spices and seasonings. Stir to mix.
3. Pressure cook for 7 minutes on the soup setting.
4. Naturally release the pressure for 30 minutes, then do a quick pressure release of any remaining pressure.
5. In a bowl, whisk together the tomato sauce, pumpkin, and Silk half and half (or canned coconut milk) and stir into the soup in the pressure cooker.
6. Allow to cool a bit and serve your chili topped with your favorite dairy free toppings like dairy free cheese dairy free sour cream.

When you’re preparing this pumpkin chili, make sure that you do not add the pumpkin to the pot before cooking it!

The first batch I made of this recipe I added all the ingredients together before cooking and I kept getting error messages because the mixture was too thick and my pressure cooker thought I didn’t have enough liquid in it.

So take our word for it, add the pumpkin after cooking! Otherwise you’ll have constant error messages interrupting your pressure cooker telling you there’s not enough liquid.

Want to add beans to this recipe? You can add your favorite canned beans to this chili along with the pumpkin, or you can serve beans on the side for people to add to their own bowls of chili if they’d like (which is what we did at our house!).

If you don’t want to use beef in this chili recipe, you can use just about any other ground meat you’d like: pork, chicken, turkey, elk, venison, etc.

I’m not sure how meatless crumbles would work in the pressure cooker, so if you want to use that just add cooked meatless crumbles after you’ve pressure cooked your chili base.

I originally made this with 2 cups of beef broth, but I think I prefer just 1 cup of broth in this recipe to make it thicker and heartier. But that’s up to you! If you want it even thicker, use 1 cup of broth instead of 2.

Making this Instant Pot chili grain free and paleo

If you want to make this recipe grain free, paleo, or Whole30, just make sure to use a green salsa/sauce that has no grains in it and you’re using a Whole30 approved canned coconut milk instead of the Silk dairy free half and half (which contains bean proteins).

The 505 mild green chili sauce/salsa that we used for our recipe has some rice flour in it, so it’s not paleo or grain free. But if you use a different brand of green chili sauce or a homemade sauce, your chili can be paleo and grain free.

A note on dairy free sour cream

Hot homemade chili is so good topped with cool and creamy dairy free sour cream!

If you’re going to use a dairy free sour cream on this chili, I’d recommend using the Follow Your Heart brand (the same one we used for our dairy free tzatziki sauce) but I’d avoid using the Good Karma dairy free sour cream.

I bought some of the Good Karma DF sour cream for chili since I couldn’t find the Follow Your Heart version and no one in my family liked it much.

We haven’t tried other brands of dairy free sour cream beyond those 2 that I mentioned, so I’m not sure what other brands taste like. But if you have the choice between Good Karma and Follow Your Heart, pick the Follow Your Heart one!

This pumpkin chili recipe would be great paired with our other recipes:

• Gluten Free Drop Biscuits
• Gluten Free Cornbread
• Garlic Roasted Rainbow Carrots
• Yeast Free Sandwich Bread