As easy as slow cookers are to operate, they do come with rules.
Not following them can ruin dinner, and your relationship with what should be your favorite
small kitchen appliance.
We've rounded up the mistakes everyone seems to make when they use slow cookers, so you
can avoid them the next time you dump and dash.
"I'm just sayin', it's a mess when it go in there, 'cause it's called a dump, but everything
you done made me tastes good."
Jack Bishop of America's Test Kitchen told Consumerist that using too much liquid is
one of the the biggest flubs people make when converting stovetop recipes to slow cooker
recipes, advising,
"Most slow cooker recipes are better with less liquid than you would use if you were
making the same thing in a pot on the stove.
So that could mean draining the canned tomatoes and discarding that juice or it might mean
using less broth than you normally would for a stew or a soup."
These modifications are necessary since evaporation doesn't occur when you're using a slow cooker,
and all that extra liquid will only result in less concentrated flavors.
If you're making beef stew or pulled pork, you probably don't care if the condensation
from the lid of the slow cooker drips back down into the crock.
But if you're making a dish where even the slightest amount of additional moisture could
ruin it, and you're not lining the lid of your slow cooker with a paper towel, you're
making a big mistake.
Sarah DiGregorio, author of Adventures in Slow Cooking, told Buzzfeed,
"The paper towels soak up the extra steam and prevent it from dripping back onto the
surface of the dish.
I use this when making cheesecakes and custards, or eggplant Parmesan.
It helps ensure the bread crumb coating on top stays crunchy."
In other words, if you have a dish where crunch factor is important, or where texture could
be thrown off by just a few extra teaspoons of water, the paper towel is an easy piece
of insurance against a fail.
Pasta in the slow cooker sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it?
It's easy to picture cooked-for-hours spaghetti that is so far past al dente it's unrecognizable.
Bon Appétit doesn't mince words on the topic, saying,
"Sure, there are slow-cooker recipes for [pasta dishes] out there, but you definitely shouldn't
attempt to make them."
As much as we respect Bon Appétit's stance on all things food, sometimes slow cooker
spaghetti and meatballs just needs to happen, and you're not destined for soggy spaghetti
if you plan ahead.
Here's the secret: don't mix the dried pasta into the sauce until you're about 20 minutes
away from mealtime.
When your pasta is perfectly al dente, serve immediately.
Or, if you don't mind the extra pot, just cook the pasta separately and add it at the
end.
Either way, you've successfully avoided a mushy mess.
"Now, what if you could prepare a wholesome, sit-down family-style meal with just a push
of a button?"
Slow cookers are pretty basic machines.
You can cook on high or low, there's no in-between.
So what's the best choice for scrumptious slow cooked meals?
As the saying goes, less is more.
According to Jack Bishop of America's Test Kitchen, using the high setting on the slow
cooker has the potential to ruin a dish.
He told Consumerist,
"If you want a beef stew with nice big chunks of beef, a lot of times the high setting can
boil the meat and it dries out and sort of falls apart."
The difference between the two settings isn't a higher temperature, it's the time it takes
for the slow cooker to reach the simmer point.
On high, that's around three to four hours, and on low, it's seven to eight.
So imagine if your dinner is cooking away on high all day while you're at work.
That meat will have been simmering for four hours longer than it needed to, not the best
way to ensure tenderness.
You've got leftovers in the slow cooker.
Clearly the easiest thing to do is throw the crock into the fridge, and reheat the whole
shebang the next day, right?
Wrong.
Unless you're interested in rolling the dice on food poisoning.
We get it, transferring the food to another dish means you just have one more thing to
wash.
But loading a still-warm crock full of still-warm food into the fridge means it probably won't
cool fast enough, and that's where you wade into the danger zone for bacteria.
Even if you have done the right thing and transferred the leftovers into shallow containers
and cooled them properly, the slow cooker still isn't a safe bet for reheating.
That's because any reheated foods need to reach a minimum of 165 degrees within two
hours, and that's just not going to happen in a slow cooker; it's slow, remember?
The USDA recommends reheating in an oven or microwave, and then using the slow cooker
to keep the food warm.
A little more work, sure, but it definitely beats the alternative.
"I did not sleep for one second last night, and I cracked the bottom of the toilet bowl."
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