Cooking for the Masses

For when you have to Cater for More than Just Family

Even if you don't own a slow cooker, also called a crock-pot, you have almost certainly seen them in other people's kitchen. There is a sort of mystique about them, . Put the ingredients for dinner in the cooker in the morning, turn it on, and it will be ready to eat at dinner time. This really can work for lots of meals, but proper technique, as well as some recipe tweaking, is called for. The following is a start, but every slow cooker should have at least one good slow cooker cookbook.

The most common use of slow cookers is to make one dish meals that involve cooking several ingredients in a low temperature wet environment for an extended time. Stew, soups, and chili would be some examples. Just load it up and walk away.

The slow cooker can cut the cost of meat; it actually works best with cheaper cuts. Braising softens the connective tissue thus making them more palatable. The juices released improve the overall flavor.

The most basic slow cookers have only a low temperature setting. This is adequate for cooking almost anything, but takes a long time to come up to cooking temperature. More expensive cookers add a high temperature setting. This can either be used for the whole cooking cycle to reduce the cooking time, or just initially to get the food up to cooking temperature. Even more expensive ones have a keep warm setting.

Except for some top of the line models, the temperature settings control the amount of heat produced by the cooker. This indirectly determines the temperature. Some advanced models have controls that can be used to specify the heating time, and even stages, such as two hours on high followed by four hours on low. A few have temperature probes that can be used to actually specify cooking temperature.

Remember to avoid frequently taking the lid off. This can drastically increase the cooking time by lowering the temperature. You can probably use less water than you would with other cooking methods. Slow cookers don't lose much while cooking, and lots of foods tend to release moisture as they cook.

This is just some of the information needed for effective use of a slow cooker. If yours has a manual, it would be a good idea to read it. Beyond this, a good slow cooker cookbook can be a worthwhile investment.

Visit www.slowcookercookbookplus.com for the slow cooker cookbook.

Tags: cookbooks, Food Recipes, slow cooker cookbook, slow cooker cookbooks

This entry was posted on Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 9:51 am and is filed under Food Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.