Italian-Style Chili

I read the first most helpful review before making this and decided to stop right there and make as written. Glad I did. While I love me some Italian sausage, replacing it for the ground beef would have been overkill. I made as written minus the full amount of sugar and this was excellent. Definite chili and not a sauce as others mentioned (read the reviews after I made it). I would actually add more liquid and make it a soup next time. Didn't love the texture of the pepperoni in the finished product but overall a good soup/chili and one I would make again.

When I tasted this on the stove I wasn't sure I was even going to be able to eat it, but it does get better the longer it cooks. The cheese really helps also, even though the recipe forgets to tell you to add it. This would be a lot better without the sugar, because spaghetti sauce already has sugar in it, so this became way too sweet for our tastes.

I came across this recipe when I was looking for something to do with extra spaghetti sauce. I left out the ground beef and used dehydrated minced onion, so used a lot less, but otherwise tried to keep it the same ingredients. This is quite good, and so easy. I sliced up the pepperoni and fried it briefly to get rid of a lot of the grease; I'd definitely recommend that! Otherwise, it would've been too much grease in this. Overall, a nice, different chili that's great for a winter night with sandwiches or just bread. Thanks for the recipe!

When I first looked her, two of five reviewers here won first place in their chili cook-offs. Imagine my surprise when my Italian Chili also won First Place! That was against seven other chilis with 21 tasters and mine was the first one served! By the way, I only made the chili once before to prep for the contest. I let it 'slow' cook for 12 hours till the 1 pm contest time and it was great. For the contest I added one long green pepper, one green pepper, more mushrooms, one Mild Italian sausage link. The rest was per the recipe. Comments were: nice texture, surprising to find pepperoni salami, great sauce taste, the mushrooms were a nice addition, sauce just hot enough.