The Slow Cooker: MiniTip XVI

TL;DR

The slow cooker is an amazing tool for chronically ill people and people who don’t have time to cook. You just throw a bunch of ingredients in and it cooks it all for you while you are sleeping or at work.

Tip Expanded

The Slow Cooker, the crockpot, the dump-and-walk-(away). It’s an amazing tool that I can’t recommend enough. When I was working, I would buy 2 pounds of chicken breasts and throw them into the crockpot before I went to work. Then, when I came back 6-7 hours later, they were fully cooked and fall-apart tender. I would rip the chicken breasts up into chunks and then coat that with barbecue sauce. It was delicious and so simple.

Crock pots are an amazing tool for chronically ill people and people who don’t have time to cook. A few weeks ago, I made a Greek leg of lamb in the crockpot and it was so tender that it fell apart with just a fork.

Here are my four biggest tips for cooking with a crockpot:

1. When you are cooking vegetables alone, cook on high,
2. When you are cooking meat with or without vegetables, cook on low. If your recipe recommends a temperature, then go with that. But oftentimes, I see that people do “this amount of time on high or this amount of time on low.”
3. When you are cooking, don’t remove the cover. This will break the seal of steam that everything is cooking in, allowing the steam and flavor to escape.
4. The longer you cook it, the more tender it becomes. You are probably going to want to cook meat longer than you think it should be, possibly 8-12 hours depending on how tender you want it. I haven’t experienced meat drying out in the crockpot.

One thing that I would like to do is figure out how to redo recipes that are on the stove so you can just do them in the crockpot. There are some flaws to this, you won’t get caramelization (a browning) of the meat or vegetables, which adds color and a bit of flavor.

The reason I am wanting to do this is because I have anhidrosis, which means that I don’t sweat. This makes cooking over the stove a potentially dangerous thing for me to do because I could get overheated and get heat exhaustion or stroke if I’m not careful.

Luckily, or unluckily, I’m pretty sure my body has a new sign that I need to cool down where it feels like I am being stabbed in my back by a thousand needles. It’s lucky because my body tells me before I have a heatstroke or exhaustion, but it is unlucky because it is absolute agony if I don’t get cool right away.