Slow Cooked: 200 exciting, new recipes for your slow cooker (4 page)

Never one to do things by halves, I did some slow-cooker research and something leapt out at me: most people using slow cookers concentrated on the first part of the name and less on the second; many of the recipes seemed to be just heating ingredients up very slowly, rather than cooking them to create something delicious.

I thought about how the slow cooker actually works: the metal outer casing of the slow cooker contains a heating element that conducts heat through a ceramic or glass crock, trapping the warmth in with a lid. Unlike the dry heat of an oven or open heat source, the lid forms a seal around the food, using the steam created in cooking to form a vacuum. This moist environment cooks the food with heat from below and above simultaneously, combining braising, baking or poaching with steaming all at the same time. The moisture in the food and the added liquid of a recipe can’t evaporate because of the tight seal on the lid. Food is more watery and the flavourings diluted by this extra liquid and this can result in the blandness that many people complain about in meals cooked in a slow cooker. Instead of fighting against the slow cooker’s style, I needed to work with it.

The obvious place to start was with my ingredients. I needed to select the right type as my foundation of the dishes and build from there. I turned my attention to cuisines and cultures that used long slow cooking and noted the ingredients they used. Fortuitously, these ingredients also suited my own frugal budget: the cheaper cuts of meat that come from the parts of the animal that do the hard work (legs and shoulder cuts); starchy and root vegetables like the humble spud or the swede and pulses all feature in slow-cooked food from around the world, opening up a wealth of opportunity and variety. I halved the amount of liquid and doubled the amount of herbs and spices and learned to work with the steam to cook a wide selection of dishes beyond the usual brown stews that people associate with the slow cooker. Once I really started to cook, not just heat, with my slow cooker, it became an essential part of my kitchen.

I’ve chosen over two hundred of the recipes I feel will best help people get to grips with the slow cooker and build a relationship with it that will make it valued in the kitchen throughout the year. I’ve gone for dishes I wanted to cook and eat. Some of these are best for batch cooking, some will impress others with your new-found skills and others will mean you don’t have to turn the oven on at all. The ragus and roasts are tastier and more tender than their traditional counterparts. The soups are simpler and the preserves and baked goods will wow everyone.

Most of the dishes you know and love will work in the slow cooker, but with a few adjustments. Pasta and rice require careful handling in a slow cooker or they become starchy and sticky and I find recipes beyond the lasagne, cannelloni and macaroni cheese listed in the book too difficult to get right, preferring the traditional methods instead. Use less alcohol in your recipes as it doesn’t evaporate in the same way and may leave a stronger flavour than you are used to.

The good news is that this change in expectations opens up all kinds of fresh ideas to your repertoire as you find new ways to revisit ingredients you might think of as old fashioned, like suet or barley. It’s introduced me to a different method of cooking a wide style of dishes, from curries to custards, and my main difficulty with the book was deciding which recipes to include because I had so much fun using my imagination and trying things out.

One of the first things people ask is: can you really leave a slow cooker unattended all day while you’re off living your life? Combining my experience, some common sense and the Fire Brigade’s advice, yes, you can. I’ve repeatedly left mine switched on overnight while I sleep and during the day while off gallivanting and I’ve never seen any fires, puffs of smoke or reason to call a fireman.

Put your slow cooker on a sturdy surface like a table or countertop rather than a carpet or shelf, keep the cable away from taps or fire sources and make sure it doesn’t have frayed wires or anything like that. Plugging it into a socket with a surge protector gives you even more peace of mind. If the slow cooker is between half and three-quarters full as it cooks, there will also be no chance of the food burning inside it.

The size and style of your slow cooker is the first thing you need to consider when starting out. Think about how you want the slow cooker to fit into your life. Do you want to be able to pop everything in before you leave the house in the morning or do you want it to turn itself on after you’ve left? Do you want to serve the food straight to the table or simply use the crock to batch-cook things for the freezer?

Small 1.5-litre slow cookers tend to be round and are excellent if you only ever plan to cook two portions of food at a time. They won’t accommodate a whole chicken, joint of meat or loaf of bread. Most standard 3.5-litre cookers are oval and will fit these larger items, while cooking enough food for four people at a time. Larger 6.5-litre slow cookers are usually oval and tend to be deeper rather than much wider. This size is best for big joints of meat or cooking for bigger families.

Most slow cookers have crocks you can lift out from the base and set on a table with care, bearing in mind that the ceramic crock can be heavy with the food in it. It can also be cumbersome to hand wash in a sink if you don’t have a dishwasher. If this is a problem for you, consider a slow cooker with the newer non-stick versions of the crock that are easier and lighter to handle.

More modern slow cookers also come with lots of useful features that make them useful for modern lives. Many have a warm function that automatically prevents the slow cooker from overcooking food, but keeps it at the right temperature to eat if you’re running late from work or the household all eat at different times. Digital slow cookers allow you to start your slow cooker whenever you like, including when you’re not there or overnight, although you can also use a standard timer plug to create this feature for yourself on a basic model.

All slow cookers are extremely economical to run. They cost about the same to run per day as a non-energy-saving light bulb. When I first got my slow cooker, despite energy rises that winter, my electric bill went down as I used my oven less often. Even using the six slow cookers I tested the recipes with, my bill only went up £30 on the previous year! (And with the warmth they create in the room, I didn’t need the heat on as much either.)

It takes a little time to get to know your slow cooker. Each model will cook at a slightly different temperature to the next, usually reaching just above 100°C as the maximum heat after 8 hours. All slow cookers have a low and high setting. The main difference between the settings is that they take different times to reach the same temperature, with the low setting taking twice as long as the high setting. It’s useful to test your slow cooker by pouring room temperature water into the crock, putting it on high and seeing how long it takes to reach 100°C. It will vary between 4–5 hours, but allows you to get a sense of whether your model cooks a little hotter or cooler. This will also reassure you that the slow cooker heats food hot enough to keep it very safe.

Don’t lift the lid on the crock until food is cooked as this causes the temperature to drop (and it can take up to 20 minutes each time to recover). It will turn slow cooking into never-ending cooking if you can’t leave that lid alone. Serving the food is similar to other forms of cooking: serve it hot, chill leftovers in a sealed container in the fridge and reheat until piping hot in the oven, microwave or on the hob. You can’t reheat food in a slow cooker.

Many people recommend greasing the crock before cooking to stop things sticking, but I find it much easier to use a reusable baking liner available in cook shops (and my branch of a well-known pound shop!) Like indestructible greaseproof paper, it saves on washing up and allows you to lift cakes, breads, omelettes and desserts out easily. Aside from this, the only other extra equipment I have used is a hand blender and a good serving spoon. Slow cookers remove the need to have
exactly
the right-sized pan for things.

I don’t adhere to a common rule of slow cookers and brown my ingredients before putting them in the crock. Usually, when making a stew you brown the meat, creating what is known as the Maillard reaction or a good seal on the meat or vegetables, enhancing their depth of flavour. It seems a shame and a waste of time to me to brown food in a pan, then put it in a slow cooker, leaving all the tasty bits stuck to the pan. I also found that sealing meat and vegetables increased the chances of overcooking them and creating the woolly texture people complain about in slow-cooker food. So missing out the browning stage not only makes life easier, but makes the food tastier too.

If you like caramelised onions to add depth to your food, it’s much easier to do a big batch of them in the slow cooker, refrigerate or freeze them until needed, and add to dishes as you go, instead of trying to brown one onion early in the morning. However, I like my veg with a little bite and if you cut them evenly and put your root vegetables close to the base of the crock to cook more evenly, you can have them tender without being mushy or overcooked.

Don’t be afraid of adding flavour to your slow-cooker meals. Savoury dishes need much more in the way of herbs and spices than their oven and stove counterparts. I get my best results with using a balance of whole and ground spices, dried and fresh herbs and fresh garlic and ginger rather than purées. I’ve never had the issues some complain of with pepper becoming bitter as it cooks, but this did happen with garlic purée, which is why I avoid it.

I prefer to spend my slow-cooker prep time on maximising the flavour, so where I can I toast whole spices before adding them. I often measure the spices out the night before and then spend 2 minutes the next morning toasting them in a dry pan. I’m really not a morning person, but even I can manage this after a cup of tea!

No matter how much anyone tells you that you need to at least halve the liquid of standard recipes and that you mustn’t keep taking the lid off and stirring it all, it’s hard to break those habits. Begin with the dishes that are straightforward such as cooking pulses from scratch, pot roast or poached chicken or the beef shin and build up, and then you won’t find yourself relegating the slow cooker to the back of the cupboard after three tries. Although it does make a very handy bread bin in between uses…

Everyone’s shopping budget varies and so do people’s tastes. I have a small weekly budget of under £20 so I know it can be alarming when you see the cost of buying things to add flavour to your food, but with a few simple tips, much of the pain can be taken out of it. You can keep costs down and still enjoy your food.

Firstly, and so common sense it seems almost too obvious to say, think about what you like and need. There’s not much point buying chillies if you don’t like spicy food. Think about what you like to cook and eat or would like to try and prioritise from there.

Secondly, do some research about the different types of ingredients and how to use and store them. I am a fully fledged anchovy addict. I love their savoury flavour and use them in everything I can. I often buy anchovy paste instead of tinned because it’s more intensely flavoured, a third of the price and goes much further in the volume I use it. Knowing that you can keep fresh ginger and spices in the freezer to prolong their life also helps you make the most of the seemingly vast choices out there.

Shop wisely for your ingredients. It may be more time consuming, but in my long experience of shopping on a budget, there is no one shop that ticks all the boxes. Supermarkets can be great for staples like pearl barley or soup mix that would cost more in a health food shop. However, the health food shop may allow you to buy herbs and spices by the weight you desire. My local deli is expensive for spices, but sells litre bottles of vinegar for the same price as a 250ml one elsewhere. It’s knowing your prices and taking time to compare that gets the best results.

Don’t be afraid to go down a shelf or a brand in the supermarkets to get those well-priced staples or buy things like dried peas that are versatile, but not as fashionable these days. Wander through the ‘world foods’ section and often you’ll save on spices and items like coconut milk especially. Venture into your local Polski Sklep or Asian-run grocery store if you have one and you’ll find all kinds of fantastic ingredients in bigger packets for smaller prices.

I’m lucky to have Brixton market on my doorstep, but I’ve made sure that everything I’ve used for the book can be bought in the major supermarkets too. The difference is that you may find them cheaper if you look further afield — try your local grocer or look online. Every so often I save up and do an online shop when I need tins and heavy items so I can make the most of the minimum order and the delivery charge. Sometimes I go to a Chinese supermarket a bus journey away and stock up on things I know I will find useful.

My recipes include frugal ingredients and I’ve made sure to give you lots of ideas for how to use certain items again and again to make the most of your store cupboard and allow cooking to become easier and more enjoyable, no matter how little time you have for it. My cooking is all about creating foundations on which to build. I poach a chicken and use the meat and the bones to make soups. Ragus make the basis of a whole lasagne or other dishes to fill the freezer. I rely on a big bag of dried chillies to save stopping off too often to buy fresh ones. Instead of using wine in my cooking, I use vermouth because, being fortified, it keeps indefinitely and is much cheaper than the equivalent volume of white wine. (It also seems more expensive than it is and it’s nice not to feel frugal all the time.) I also take advantage of seasonal offers, getting duck or goose fat around Christmastime, for example, knowing these fats last well in the fridge.

The perk of building your store cupboard slowly is that it allows you to try things out and find your own cooking style. I’ve offered a wide variety of flavours and tastes throughout the book and ended up trying new things I wouldn’t usually have in the house. I’ve then made those items earn their spot in my small cupboard and used them multiple times, creating new favourites. Hopefully this will give you the reassurance to do the same and create slow-cooking favourites.