The Great American Slow Cooker Book (2 page)

Recipes, like a good party, are a group effort. We’ve all got to chip in.

Follow sensory cues, not timings.
Since these recipes have been calibrated for more than one size of slow cooker, we considered giving no timings whatsoever, even for browning or searing or steaming ingredients. After all, if you’re cooking a small batch of a stew, you might first need to soften 1 cup of onions on the stove—which might take you under 5 minutes; if you’re working on a large batch, those onions might increase to 3 cups—and the task suddenly jumps to 10 minutes or more. But then we took a deep breath and realized we didn’t need to rewrite the rules of the cookbook game. So we offer the timings as a range: “Cook until translucent, between 4 and 10 minutes.” The real cue here is the visual one—
translucent
.

Experiment the second time, not the first.
Will every recipe be to your liking? Of course not. But hold off on manipulating the ingredients until you’ve made the dish once. You’ll have a better understanding of how it stands. We also hope you read and cook the recipes with a pen in hand, marking the book to remind you what you’ve done.

Read the ingredients carefully.
Where possible, we have tried to list the things you’ll
need as they might appear on a shopping list:
1 tart medium green apple.
However, life doesn’t always work out in round numbers and neat quantities, so we’ve also listed some ingredient amounts that are not whole items—like
3 tablespoons chopped tart green apple.
That’s certainly less than even a small apple would yield, and so it has been stated as a
volume
amount, rather than its supermarket amount. In that vein, we’ve also given some ingredients in
weight
, not volume: for example,
2 pounds peaches, peeled and pitted
. Here, we’ve assumed you can use the scale at the supermarket to get the correct weight. When a little more or less of something would have no effect on the results, we’ve felt free to go with the market equivalent:
2 medium carrots, chopped
. But when we’re trying to balance flavors carefully and accurately, we’ve been far more precise, asking you to chop and then measure what you’ve got: ½
cup chopped carrot
.

Don’t confuse fresh and dried herbs.
After twenty-one cookbooks (not counting those for celebs), we’ve come to think of fresh and dried herbs as separate ingredients. Yes, there’s a longstanding cookbook tradition that says you can use half the amount of dried for fresh. But you can’t. Dried tarragon is more like licorice than its fresh kin, which has grassy and lemony overtones; fresh sage is far more subtle than dried; and dried basil has a tealike taste that bears little resemblance to fresh, peppery basil leaves. We use dried thyme rather than fresh when we want a subtler, more sophisticated finish; we use fresh rosemary rather than dried when we want the more pungent, even savory, perfume of the former.

Brighten leftovers.
Because the slow cooker shears off spiky notes from herbs, cools the heat of chiles, and mutes acids like lemon juice, reheating the leftovers can be particularly daunting. Storing a stew overnight blunts its flavors even more; freezing it, further yet. For a successful day-after meal, you need to perk it back up. Stir in a bit more of the herbs used in the original. Add a little more chili powder, a little more spiky chili sauce. Or take the easiest way out: stir a little lemon juice into the leftovers before you reheat them.

If you’ve got a nonstick slow cooker, modify your tools.
Some slow cookers have that special nonstick coating because the insert can be removed to set it on the stovetop and brown various ingredients. If yours is so made, you’ll need to use a nonstick-safe whisk or spatula; otherwise, you can nick the coating. In fact, even ceramic canisters should be given the kid-glove treatment. You can certainly scratch them when you cut a cake into slices while it’s still inside. Always err on the side of tools made to work with nonstick surfaces, even if you have a standard cooker.

Almost every recipe in this book has a set of specific components. Here’s what they mean.

Effort.
We’ve divided these recipes into three categories, based on their difficulty:
Not much
,
A little
, and
A lot
. We arrived at these categories by taking into account (1) the work you do (the prepping involved as well as any out-of-the-cooker cooking) and (2) the payoff. Merely browning something at the stove often disqualifies a recipe from the
Not much
category, but not always; there are a few recipes where browning is so minimal compared to the supper payoff that the effort gets discounted. Making a spice rub for a brisket is not enough to kick the recipe into
A little
; opening a flank steak, stuffing it with vegetables, and rolling it closed is enough to bump the recipe into the
A lot
ranks. So look at the level of effort as a general guide and compare it to the following bit of information, the two in tandem. That is…

Prep time.
This represents the time you’ll spend doing anything
outside
the slow cooker. Prepping includes chopping, mincing, and rubbing,
as well as
browning, marinating, and even hauling stuff out of the pantry. It also includes post-slow-cooker activities: deboning, straining, pureeing, and reducing. (But it does not include clean-up. That’s why you have children.)

Cook time.
This is the time everything spends
inside
the appliance. Most recipes are exact:
8 hours on low
, for example. A few, however, have ranges:
5 to 6 hours on low
, mostly because of the way some cuts of chewy, tough meat get tender at their own rate. Some recipes offer two timings:
5 hours/8 hours
, for example. In this case, we offer a time frame for cooking on low and also one for cooking on high. Finally, a handful of recipes, particularly in the fish chapter, have a qualification on the timing:
2 hours 20 minutes on high at most
. In these cases, the fish will be done quickly once it’s added to the hot sauce—so you’ll need to stay in the kitchen and keep checking on the dish for the best dinner possible.

Keeps on warm.
Most modern slow cookers have a
keep warm
setting that precludes the necessity of many of the old-fashioned time swings: 6 to 9 hours. If your model doesn’t have a
keep warm
setting, you’ll need to be a tad more exacting in the overall timing. We do not, for example, believe that dried whole wheat pasta can sit on low for 4 to 7 hours; at 4 hours, it’s good to go, and at 7, it’s mush. To that end, we’ve taken into account the various components of a dish—that pasta, as well as vegetables, go boggy and meatballs fall apart—to come up with some notion of how long the dish can sit before you get to it, once the appliance clicks to its
keep warm
setting.

Servings.
Because we’re working with a range of ingredient quantities, we also give the number of servings in a range: from 4 to 10, for example. We’re two guys who can polish off a big bowl of short ribs each and still want a salad. Your appetite might be daintier—or heftier. Use our suggestion for the number of servings as just that: a suggestion.

These are probably the single most innovative piece of this book—and subject to confusion, as innovations are. Here is an example of a recipe chart:

We should make two notes about these charts.