Instant Pot Pork and Black-Eyed Pea Chili

Instant Pot Pork and Black-Eyed Pea Chili. Pressure cooker chili with pork cubes and dried black-eyed peas. Ready in under an hour, with no soaking, thanks to pressure cooking.

Michael Symon, the Food Network chef and local Cleveland boy made good, is a big influence on my love of food. I was looking for ideas for a fall pork chili when I came across his Pork Cheek and Black-Eyed Pea Chili Recipe in Food & Wine magazine. Pork and black eyed peas? What a great idea!

Now, pork cheeks are hard to come by at my local stores. Instead of a trip to a specialty butcher, I substituted pork shoulder, my favorite pork for pressure cooking

Jump to:

• 🥫Ingredients
• 🥘 Substitutions
• 🛠 Equipment
• 📏Scaling
• 🤨 Soaking Black-Eyed Peas?
• Sorting Peas
• 💡Tips and Tricks
• Instant Pot Pork and Black-Eyed Pea Chili
• ☃️ Storage
• 🤝 Related Posts
• 💬 Comments

I found out (as usual) that Mr. Symon is a culinary genius. Black-eyed peas make a great chili bean, and they cook quickly enough that they don’t need to be soaked. Thanks to the black-eyed peas, this recipe is even quicker than my Ground Pork and Bean chili. And that recipe has soaked beans! I’m going to use black-eyed peas in a bunch of my chili recipes going forward.

🥫Ingredients

• Dried black-eyed peas
• Vegetable oil
• Cubed pork shoulder
• Onion
• Red Bell Pepper
• Garlic
• Jalapeno
• Chili powder
• Coriander
• Cumin
• Cinnamon
• Fresh ground black pepper
• Beer
• Chicken broth
• Baking soda
• Fire roasted crushed tomatoes

See recipe card for quantities.

🥘 Substitutions

There are a lot of ingredients in this recipe, and that’s after I’ve simplified it a bit from Chef Symon’s original version. I’ll mention how to simplify the recipe even more in this section - skip the things I list as optional - or what to add to go back to Chef Symon’s version.

Black-eyed peas are the key to this recipe; they add a bean backbone to this chili. You can substitute canned, but they will get a bit mushy by the time the pork is cooked through. If you want to substitute another small dried bean, like cranberry, small red, or navy beans - but soak them overnight, and increase the pressure cooking time to 20 minutes to cook them all the way through.

Pork shoulder - 1-inch cubes of pork shoulder match the cooking time of the black-eyed peas. It’s OK if they’re smaller, but try not to get bigger cubes. In the original recipe, Chef Simon used pork cheeks instead of pork shoulder - they cook like pork shoulder, so if you want to sub them in, go for it, and follow the recipe as written.

Onion, red bell pepper, and garlic: These aromatics are the base of any chili or stew. I consider the red bell pepper optional, but the onion and garlic are essential to the recipe.

If you want to cut the heat in the recipe, remove the seeds from the jalapeño pepper, or skip jalapeño entirely. If you want more heat, add a second jalapeño, or a canned Chipotle en Adobo pepper with some adobo sauce, for smoky heat. (Chef Symon goes with the 1 jalapeño and 1 chipotle en adobo approach, and it is a great addition, if you have Chipotle en Adobo handy.)

If you want to eliminate the heat entirely, skip the Jalapeño, and substitute smoked Spanish paprika for the chili powder. Now, I’m not judging you, but…why are you making chili if you don’t want heat?

The spice blend - chili powder, ground coriander, ground cumin, and cinnamon - can be replaced with all chili powder if you want to make things simple. But I love the extra complexity the coriander, cumin, and cinnamon add to the dish. I think I picked up my love of ground coriander from Chef Simon, actually - he uses it in a lot of his dishes, and I can see why. I love the extra flavor it adds.

Chef Symon uses a cinnamon stick, which he discards, instead of the ground cinnamon.

Chicken broth: use homemade chicken broth (which you should make in batches and freeze, since it’s one of the killer recipes that the Instant Pot makes), or low-sodium store-bought chicken broth if you don’t have time to make your own. Or, substitute water, and add ½ teaspoon of salt.

Beer adds a hint of acid to the chili, and the alcohol helps bring out the flavor in the spices. I prefer a darker beer for this chili, because I like the roasted, sweeter flavor of those beers. I use Elliot Ness from Great Lakes brewery, an amber lager, but a dark ale, porter, or stout are also good. That said, almost any beer will work.

Skipping the beer: If you don’t want any alcohol in the dish, substitute a little more chicken broth or water.

The baking soda helps keep the beans tender. There are some acidic ingredients in this chili (beans, tomatoes), and an acidic environment toughens up the beans. The baking soda helps counter the acid in the other ingredients.

Fire roasted crushed tomatoes are best for this recipe, but tough for me to find sometimes. I make a special trip to my local organic store to get Muir Glen tomatoes. If you can’t find fire roasted crushed, regular crushed tomatoes are fine - not quite as smoky, but still good.

Chef Symon accompanies this recipe with shredded smoked cheddar, creme fraiche, and minced cilantro leaves. I go with regular shredded cheddar, sour cream, and cilantro, because I always have those on hand. If you want to add finesse to the recipe, go with Chef's original choices.

🛠 Equipment

A 6-quart pressure cooker

📏Scaling

This recipe scales down easily - cut everything in half and it will fit in a 3-quart pressure cooker. Scaling up runs into space issues; if you have an 8-quart pressure cooker, you can double this recipe, but it’s too much to fit in a 6-quart pressure cooker.

🤨 Soaking Black-Eyed Peas?

I get the “to soak or not to soak?” question all the the time. I don’t soak black-eyed peas. They cook in 15 minutes under pressure - soaking them seems like a waste of time when they cook so quickly.

Sorting Peas

Black-eyed peas are an agricultural product, and like other beans, stuff tends to creep in when they are processed. Dried beans should always be sorted and rinsed before using, to get rid of any twigs, stones, clumps of dirt, or broken beans.

To sort the black-eyed peas, I pour them out on one side of a rimmed baking sheet (a half-sheet pan), to keep the peas from escaping. Then I slowly run my fingers through the pile of peas, pulling them towards me on the sheet. I watch the peas as they move, looking for anything that doesn't seem right. If I see something, I poke around in the peas until I find what caught my eye, and discard it. I repeat this a couple of times, until I'm satisfied everything is out of the peas.

Then I dump the peas into a fine mesh strainer and rinse them under cold running water, to wash off any dirt or dust.

Now the black-eyed peas are sorted, rinsed, and ready for soaking or cooking.

💡Tips and Tricks

Simmer to thicken: If you have the time, and want thicker chili, simmer for 10 to 20 minutes after pressure cooking. Set the Instant Pot to Sauté mode adjusted to low, with a 20 minute cooking time, and leave the lid off to let the broth evaporate. Stir occasionally, scraping the bottom of the pot with a flat-edged wooden spoon to make sure nothing is sticking and burning. When the chili is thickened to your liking, cancel the heat and it is ready to serve.

Searing the pork on one side: This is my compromise between the extra time it takes to sear the meat, and the depth of flavor you get from the browned crispy bits that searing the meat adds. I want that extra flavor, but I don't want to take the time to sear all sides of the pork cubes - that takes forever, and always seems to burn on the bottom of the pot. If you're in a hurry, you can skip the browning step - but I don't consider it optional when I'm cooking.

Adapted from: Pork Cheek and Black-Eyed Pea Chili Recipe - Michael Symon | Food & Wine

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☃️ Storage

This chili can be made a day ahead, refrigerated, and reheated - if anything, it tastes better this way, thanks to a day of letting the flavors mingle.

To store for later, portion into 2-cup containers, and refrigerate for up to 3 days, or freeze for up to 6 months. I love having chili in the freezer - I use them as grab-and-go lunches, which reheat in about 5 minutes in the microwave.

🤝 Related Posts

5 Ingredient Chili
Pressure Cooker Texas Red Chili
Instant Pot Ground Pork and Bean Chili
Pressure Cooker Ground Beef and Bean Chili
Instant Pot Braised Pork Belly
My other Instant Pot and Pressure Cooker Recipes

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