We had a crock pot way back when. Stew, soup, chili, sauces and a few other things I don’t recall before it was relegated to a shelf in the pantry. While it worked well it needed periodic attention, so leaving it on while away at work all day limited its use and I’m not sure we realized any advantages or better uses.
Fast forward and Carrie decides to get a slow cooker, technically a crock pot with a programmable heat/cook/hold cycles. The first thing she tries is a pot roast. Put it on to cook 9 hours then go to warm. Of course Carrie had to leave work and go home to check it and it was doing just fine. It was great. The left over pot roast was cooked some more in Mexican seasoning and shredded for tacos one night and wet burritos the next. Next was black bean soup to go with our rainy weather. Two dinners with cornbread on the side and one lunch with flour tortillas. Next was a corned beef round. Any time she does corned beef on the stove, she puts the potatoes and carrots in half way through the cook time and they are still mushy. Not in the slow cooker. Everything went in at 10AM and cooked til 7PM, then went to warm. Best corned beef I’ve ever had and the potatoes and carrots were firm and tasty. Two days of hot corned beef with Swiss cheese sandwiches on dark rye followed.
Maybe we weren’t inventive with the crock pot, but Carrie is collecting recipes for anything slow cooked and I’m thinking it may become mainstream and I can sell the crock pot as an antique.
We bought a slow cooker right before my wife went back to work from maternity leave. It has become a huge part of our weekly routine. We can prep most of our dishes in 30min and come home to a hot meal and minimal cleanup.
Carrie tried chicken cacciatore last night, served over rice. The sauce and rice were stellar. Not so the chicken. All the beef dishes have come out tender, moist and tasty. The chicken was dry with the consistency of compressed saw dust and tasted like it too. Carrie thinks it may have cooked too long so a learning curve on chicken. She used boneless, skinless breasts and thinks maybe thighs would work better, skin included, to keep in moisture.
Anton,
Our slow cooker looks like your description. You’ll have to learn to call it a slow cooker. Crock Pot is a passe and exposes our advanced age.
I thought Crock-Pot was simply a brand of slow-cooker- i.e. Kleenex is a brand of facial tissue. Is that not accurate? Don’t tell me something as stupidly easy as slow cooking now requires research! My brain is full!
We use ours about twice a month. Most chicken recipes we use thighs rather than breasts for better results, but for green chile chicken we use breasts and only cook for 3 hours (so not on work days). Butter chicken, chicken stock (overnight from leftover whole chicken carcasses), short ribs, etc. we use it more than the instant pot, which I’m still not totally sold on.
Here’s an example of my problem with the instant pot. My wife hears 8min for steel cut oats? Sign me up!!
But by the time the thing gets to pressure and temp, cooks for 8min, and then naturally cools/releases, I could have cooked the oatmeal on the stove. Same goes for anything that’s not a large target protein. So it’s likely very good for big pork roasts and stuff like that, but I haven’t really dug into those recipes yet. Maybe corned beef or ribs will be my next things to try.
We have an electronic pressure cooker along with our slow cooker. If I had to choose just one, I’d keep the slow cooker.
What I like about the slow cooker is that we can do everything in the AM, cook all day, and it is ready when we come home. I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving the pressure cooker on warm all day.
Agree, our stove top pressure cooker and crock pot are key to saving time with a little one now in the family. I would not leave our pressure cooker on all day but do that with the crock pot 1-2 times a week in winter and 1-2 times a month in summer.
Based on another thread though I think the insta pot can be either a pressure cooker or a slow cooker/crock pot.