Atchara Chili Recipe: Serve an Easy, Vegan Dinner For Around .50 Cents Per Person

As I mentioned recently, we’ve been eating a lot of chili recently. A crockpot is your best friend when your mobility is reduced, allowing you to easily create a large, one-pot dish. I like making chili because it’s so fast and simple to throw together, and it’s also extremely frugal. Of course, it gets a tad redundant eating the same thing, but my desire for a wide palate is negated by my physical limitations and budget. Sure, there’s loads of creative foodie dishes you can put together for next to nothing – but I can’t spend that much prep time on my feet at this stage in my knee recovery. So chili it is!

But eating the same thing doesn’t have to be boring. I’ve been experimenting with different combinations of ingredients and spices in my chili to use up what I have on hand and create new flavors. Yesterday, I received a jar of atchara in the mail from Tropical Traditions, who had sent it to me as a complimentary review sample. Atchara is a Filipino condiment made from unripe raw green papaya fermented with raw ginger root and other ingredients in vinegar. I’ve never had atchara before, so I was looking forward to tasting it. I’ve always had a fascination with regional cuisine and learning about the kind of food that people eat in different places and how it is served. I LOVE pickled onions and usually like any other pickled dish, and I had a feeling that atchara would have a flavor in a similar vein to this. It’s very tangy, with an added kick from the ginger – I quite like the taste. Atchara is traditionally served as a side dish to fried foods, and since ginger and papaya can help settle an upset stomach, this makes a lot of sense to me. But rather than bust out a deep frier – I can’t anyway, since I don’t own one, sniff sniff! – I decided to try something more unconventional, and add atchara to my next batch of chili.

Atchara Chili Recipe

Ingredients:

Pinto Beans
Chopped white onion
1 heaping TBSP. atchara
Hot sauce of your choice (I used one packet of Taco Bell Fire Roasted Hot Sauce)
Crushed red pepper flakes
Garlic salt
Black pepper
1 can of crushed tomatoes
1 can water

Preparation:

I took one small Ziploc bag of frozen beans and added it to the slow cooker with some chopped, frozen onion. To this I added 1 heaping tablespoon of atchara, 1 packet of Taco Bell hot sauce, 1 packet of Pizza Hut crushed red pepper flakes, garlic salt and black pepper to taste.

To this, I added 1 can of crushed tomatoes and 1 can of water. I turned the slow cooker on low before I went to bed and let it cook for 8 hours.

Serve over rice!

Atchara adds a sweet tang to the chili that I found to be very enjoyable. I will absolutely add atchara to my next chili batch! I didn’t add much hot sauce to this batch as I wasn’t sure if a lot of spiciness would be too overpowering combined with the tanginess of the atchara. However, the chili turned out to be very mild, so I think you could easily add more hot sauce if heat’s your thing. This chili is quick and easy to make, suitable for vegetarians and vegans, and is also inexpensive.

Cost Breakdown:

1 bag of pinto beans cost me $1.00. Once cooked, it produces 4 Ziploc bags worth of beans which I then freeze. Each bag is enough to make one large batch of chili, making the final cost per chili batch .25 cents.

In May, I bought 17 & 1/2 pounds of onions for $4.17 after sales and coupons. We chopped and froze all of them, and this chili actually used up the very last of it. I’ve been using them constantly for the last 9 months, so they lasted us a really long time. I’m not sure what the exact cost per serving was, but it wouldn’t be more than a few cents since I used it in SO many meals.

The hot sauce and red pepper flakes are condiments left over from fast food, which I saved to cook with instead of throwing away. I mentioned how I cook with these in my last chili recipe!

The garlic salt and black pepper were $1.00 each. These canisters last for an incredibly long time, so I can’t hazard a guess as how to much each shake costs.

One large can of crushed tomatoes costs me $1.00. (I should rename this to Dollar Tree chili! ;)) This costs less than purchasing fresh tomatoes at the moment.

The atchara is the most expensive part of this dish, costing $12.99 per 16 oz jar. There are over 30 tablespoons worth of atchara in each jar, making it around .43 cents per tablespoon.

I like to serve this over rice, and usually prepare the contents of one bag over the course of eating the chili and leftovers; this costs me $1.00.

I’ll add .20 cents to cover the ingredients that I don’t have an exact cost per serving on – the salt & pepper and onion. I’ll also assume that you don’t have fast food packets hanging around, and add another .25 cents for hot sauce and red pepper flakes. That would make the cost per batch of chili around $3.13. Each batch feeds 2 people for 2-3 meals, making your final cost for both the chili and the rice per person per meal between .52 and .79 cents, depending on how much you eat. Of course, your price will vary depending on what seasonings you already have, where you live and what sales are going on, but the great thing about this chili is that it’s super versatile and can be adapted to whatever you have.

Want to stretch your budget even further? I will be giving away a jar of atchara on Monday morning, so check back for your chance to win! Getting an ingredient for free makes this chili even cheaper! 😉

Disclaimer: Tropical Traditions provided me with a free sample of this product to review, and I was under no obligation to review it if I so chose. Nor was I under any obligation to write a positive review in return for the free product. This post contains affiliate links.