This spicy porter short rib chili is the perfect bowl of comfort food on a cold day.

I’ve been a bit obsessed with apple cider donuts this fall. Usually, fall will roll around, I’ll have maybe 3 or 4 for the season and we’ll call it good until next year. This year, I don’t even want to think about how many have been consumed.

So last weekend my brother and sister in law were visiting and we planned an entire day around hiking + apple cider donuts. 10am we pulled up to the base of the mountain we were going to hike, hauled our asses 1 mile straight up to the top, followed my hiking obsessed brother with his gung-ho trail gps app on his phone around for another 5 miles at the top (only getting lost about 3 times) discussing apple cider donuts and how many we were going to shove in our faces afterwards for about 3 hours.

With every step down the mountain, I could start to taste them in my mouth. We ate a quick burger lunch in the town nearby and then drove straight to the farm market that I’ve frequented every other weekend this fall for my cider donut fix.

We walked to the back where they keep them and were greeted with a completely empty donut shelf.

My heart sank.

Clearly they had to be making more, 3pm on an October Saturday and you’re out of donuts?! Blasphemous.

But they weren’t so after a few cursed mumblings from me, I stormed out and declared we were going to the local grocery store/market where they fry them fresh outside because I wasn’t giving up on cider donuts that easily.

We pull in and I can see the guys at the fryer stand….cleaning up for the day. I run over, take one look in the fryer to see if maybe there were still a few in there and then literally start begging them to make more.

It didn’t work. They ran out of dough.

So instead of donuts, I bought short ribs inside and pouted for the rest of the day.

If ever there were a bright side to running out of cider donuts, it’s this short rib chili.

This was one of those recipes where I just decided to wing it, throw it stuff that sounded good together in a pot with absolutely no plan and pray that it turned out.

I thought at best it’d be something I could share on here after some tweaks except I totally got lucky and nailed it on the first attempt.

You want smoky, cocoa comfort on a cold day? This is your recipe.

Now give me a donut.

More cozy chili and stew recipes to try out:

Slow Cooker Lamb Stew

Spicy Hummus Turkey Chili

Chicken apple cheddar chili

Moroccan Lamb Lentil Stew

Kabocha Squash Chili