What is a SLOW COOKER?

Maybe you read recipes that are cooked in a slow cooker, but what is a slow cooker?

A slow cooker or also know as CrockPot, is an electrical cooking appliance used to simmer at low temperature and long cooking times. This electric tool offers unattended cooking for long hour dishes, such as stews, soups, roasts and many other dishes.

The appliance is extremely safe as you can leave it on an entire night to get an amazing stew or soup in the morning. Or as I usually do, place a whole chicken in it and let it cook the entire Sunday morning while I do groceries, sports or whatever outside while lunch is being cooked. By lunchtime, the chicken is ready, soft and juicy to enjoy it!

The settings are super easy to use as it has three options, Low and High to cook and WARM to keep food warm.

LOW option for a lower temperature and longer cooking time.

HIGH higher temperature and shorter cooking time.

TEMPERATURE. Both options, low and high will reach a cooking temperature of 100ºC. The only difference is that the Low option will take longer time than High option. Almost double the time. That means that if a recipe says 6 hours in Low you can adjust it to 3 hours High.

Regarding ELECTRICITY consumption, slow cookers consume 150 Watts per hour at Low temperature. That means a total of 825 W for 5 hours and a half which is the time you need to cook a chicken. This amount is way lower consumption than an oven needs to roast the same chicken. The oven uses 1200W.

PRICE. A manual slow cooker costs around 50 euros.

My experience

I bought a slow cooker, mine is a CrockPot, 3 years ago, and since then I changed my way of cooking for certain recipes.

Mine is the manual 3,5L CrockPot, I paid around 40 euros and it makes a huge difference for certain recipes.

I use it a lot to make legume stews, vegetable stews, broths, soup, meat, fish… Cooking in low temperature and long times makes food super tender and juicy. One of the best parts is that I can cook things during the night. Complete unattended and get amazing broths, stews, soups, cakes, roasted vegetables… in the morning.

If you are cooking a chickpea stew or a whole chicken, all turns as soft as butter and super juicy.

WHICH SLOW COOKER?

If you are looking for a slow cooker and do not know which one to pick, here a little help.

MANUAL or DIGITAL Slow Cooker?

MANUAL Slow cooker setting is pretty basic as the only option is to adjust the temperature. Also, it needs to be switched off manually ones the food is ready. For me, this is not a problem at all and you can always use an external timer, as I do.

DIGITAL Slow cookers offer few more settings to adjust the timing so the device will switch off automatically after the time you programmed. So definitely handly.

Mine is a manual one as the only thing I need to do is to set an alarm on my phone or with Alexa. If I would buy a new one it will still be a manual one.