Let's Learn: Slow Cooking!
Learning how to slow cook is perfect for this time of year, when the nights are drawing in and we need more hearty, home cooked comfort food. Slow cooking enhances the natural flavour of ingredients, along with making meat mouth-wateringly succulent. Also, slow cooking is an incredibly diverse technique, allowing you to create an assortment of delicious dishes, from gooey cakes and pulled pork to warming casseroles and stews.
Owning a slow cooker isn’t essential to try this cooking method. In fact, slow cooking was popular before the slow cooker itself became a widely available gadget in the 1970’s. If you don’t own one all you need is a cast-iron casserole dish or heavy-bottomed stockpot and a relaxing day at home when you can keep the oven on. This isn’t to say that slow cooked recipes made in a proper slow cooker aren’t welcome too, in fact we can't wait to share a variety of slow cooked recipes to celebrate this diverse method on Cookpad!
Tips and Tricks
-There’s some debate if you should cook ingredients off before adding them to the slow cooker. Both methods work and change the flavour of your finished dish, it just depends on how much preparation you would like to do beforehand. However, for true easy slow cooking, just pop the uncooked ingredients into the pot and turn it on.
-Slow cooking requires less liquid than you might expect. Moisture is retained when the food is cooking, as it evaporates slowly. Be prepared to add less liquid to your dish than what you might be used to.
-If you do add too much liquid and your dish looks too wet add some thickening agent, such as corn flour or regular flour 20 minutes before you take it off the heat.
-Slow cooking pasta dishes is also possible. Slow cooking pasta in the sauce creates a much richer flavour than simply preparing it on the hob. To ensure that the pasta doesn’t go mushy add it to the slow cooked sauce about 15 minutes before removing it from the heat.
-Prepare your ingredients the night before so in the morning you just need to throw them into your slow cooker and get on with the day. Come dinner time, you have an amazing dish!
-If you are slow cooking without a slow cooker, assess if your recipe needs to be on the hob or in the oven. Hob-top recipes should be cooked in a heavy bottomed stockpot. Oven recipes work best in a casserole dish (with a lid). Also, make sure you cook your dish at a time when you can stay in the house for a few hours, we don’t recommend leaving the oven on if you’re not in!
-Slow cooking is a great budget-friendly technique. Cheaper cuts of meat are perfect for slow cooking and you can also use less meat. Slow cooking means that the meat flavour has more time to permeate the sauce and other ingredients, giving the dish a much stronger meaty flavour.
-Speaking of slow cooking with meat, trim off the fat from meat cuts before adding them to the slow cooker. When frying meat the fat melts away, however in a slow cooker this fat has nowhere to go, so it can lead to an excessively oily dish if not removed.
Is your mouth watering? Take a look at some succulent slow cooked dishes shared by our Cookpad community for more inspiration-