The downside - the metal inserts for this are really pricey and hard to find. I’ve got an All-Clad with a metal insert and love the convenience: it allows you to brown things in the slow cooker directly, which means you get all the tasty browned bits and also means one less pan to clean. Slow cookers generally come with ceramic inserts, but some have stove-safe metal inserts.Here’s a couple more quick tips on cooking with a slow cooker: So when you’re reading a slow cooker recipe and it tells you to do these things, don’t skip steps ? However, little shortcuts like microwaving the aromatics (onions, garlic, spices, etc.) beforehand or browning the meat the slow cooker insert before cooking add serious depth of flavor and make worlds of difference. Many people want to take short cuts: they simply cut up a bunch of veggies, toss them in the slow cooker with some meat, and come back later to find watery, bland mush. There’s one thing you should know about slow cookers: a little extra time spent at the beginning will yield MUCH better results at the end. I love using the slow cooker to make carnitas, shredded chicken, moroccan stews – all sorts of great foods that are really tasty, really filling, really indulgent, and don’t feel like “diet food” at all. This will also make a TON of beans usually you’ll be set up for a good portion of the week.īut in addition to making beans easy, my favorite thing about the slow cooker is all the comfort food that you can do in it. You can set it up in the evening and then have beans ready the next morning, or put them on in the morning and have beans ready when you get home. You’ll have some nice, mildly-seasoned beans that you can use as the basis for any sort of recipe and they’ll come out perfect every time. To show you how easy it is to make beans in the slow cooker, here’s the basic recipe: take 1 pound of dried beans (wash and pick them over), put them in the slow cooker with 2 bay leaves and 5 cups of liquid (water or chicken broth), and cook for 9-11 hours. Lentils are even easier - usually they can just go in with the meat and the rest of the ingredients and they’ll be fully-cooked at the end. So it allows you to walk away and get on with your life once the ingredients are all in the pot. This simplifies things a lot: you don’t have to soak beans overnight, boil them for a long time, and hang around the whole time they’re cooking. If you toss beans into the slow cooker and you’ve got enough liquid with them, you’ll pretty much always have perfectly-done beans after 9 hours (of course, that will make for some bland beans, but there’s recipes for that ? ).
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At the end of that, you’ll have nice hot tasty goodness ready for your enjoyment.įor people on the slow-carb diet, this is particularly helpful because this cooking method is ideally-suited for legumes.
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Generally, you put all the ingredients into the slow cooker, set it on “low”, and then let it cook for 8-11 hours.
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They are FANTASTIC for things like stews, chiles, long braises, baked beans, pulled pork, and tons of things that fall into the “comfort food” category. Slow cookers (or crock pots) allow you to easily cook things at lower temperatures for long periods of time. Among those things: the fact that cooking your own meals all the time can get very time-consuming, particularly when you’re cooking legumes! This is where I think one of the big slow carb diet secret weapons comes in: the slow cooker. However, there are a couple things about it that are somewhat inconvenient. The slow carb diet is fantastic in many ways: lose weight, eat well, don’t feel hungry all the time, have a day when you can go nuts… all these things are what makes the diet work.