With the Instant Pot I find it is better to make chili in stages. The brute force of 20 minutes renders the chicken highly shreddable but murders the beans and vegetables. So usually I do things one at a time. I started with the beans, some fancy white bean from Mexico grown only by Mayans or some damn thing, Rancho Gordo tells me. 10 minutes is fine. I have to take the beans out and then comes the chicken. Vegetables come last for 3 or 4 minutes. When I was done with the chicken, though, the bean to chicken ratio was way off. I’d planned on green chicken chili which is a fine month of pain slop-like meal. The beans were already done so I had to make more. I then had the scathingly brilliant idea (a line from the Parent Trap with Hayley Mills—a personal fave of mine when I was a kid much to my father’s disappointment) to make 2 kinds of chili. Red and green. I then Instant Potted up some black beans (which surprisingly did not take the pressure as well as the white beans note to self).
Then I finished them both in different real pots rather than 2 more Instant Pot sessions. I was pretty sick of that insanity. (I also weighed the cooked chicken so I had equal amounts, just in case I hadn’t been being mentally disordered enough).
When I was done though, I thought Oh, cool, I can have them both in the same bowl side by side!! I ladled them carefully into each side of the bowl and put sour cream and chopped onions in the middle. It was pretty and delicious even if it was a little difficult to eat with the straight jacket on.
