Slow (Not Effortless) Cooking

Canadian Living: The Slow Cooker Collection
Elizabeth Baird and the Canadian Living Test Kitchen
Transcontinental Books, paperback
October 2009, 272 pages, $22.95

I have a love-hate relationship with my slow cooker. More specifically, I love the idea that my dinner can cook while I’m off doing other things, but I hate every recipe I’ve made in this appliance in the 12-or-so years I’ve owned one.

Hate is a strong word, I know, but what else is there to feel when all you have to show for eight hours of cooking time are watery, unevenly cooked, and generally uninspiring results? And then there are the slow-cooker cookbooks themselves, which are often plagued by dated, hokey interior designs and feature a standard lineup of soups and stews, with a few black bean and chickpea dishes interspersed as a nod to vegetarians.

Not surprisingly, then, the slow cooker — sometimes called a Crock-Pot, a brand name often used generically — lurking in the back of my appliance cupboard comes up on the chopping block every year as I weigh its worth versus the space it takes up. Yet every year I’m persuaded that some day someone will produce a cookbook that will let me to use this appliance successfully. Enter the Slow Cooker Collection, published last autumn, just in time for comfort-food season and my last-ditch attempt to make slow cooking a viable alternative to take-out on busy days in my household.

Things look promising the moment I crack the spine. An attractive palette dominated by burgundy, teal, and chartreuse complements a handsome, clean layout that includes full-colour photographs and spacious margins dotted with test-kitchen tips and substitutions. Content-wise, the introductory section on slow-cooker technique covers essential information on selecting appropriate ingredients and heat levels, converting standard recipes for slow cooking, and ensuring food safety. Most important of all, however, it reveals why so many of the recipes I’ve tried over the years have failed. People, listen up: It is a myth that slow cooking involves merely filling the crock and walking away.

Elizabeth Baird and her colleagues in the Canadian Living test kitchen are honest about what makes for tasty slow-cooker results: browning. By browning meat, poultry, and vegetables before stewing them, you create the brown bits at the bottom of the pan that, when scraped up into a recipe’s liquid, give the finished dish depth of flavour. Most of us are already well versed in this method; we just need to apply it to our slow cooking. The authors are also frank about needing to use flour to thicken cooking liquids into gravy, which is the last step in many of the book’s recipes. Together, these two factors go a long way in warding off the dreaded thin, insipid slow-cooker dinner.

Thus educated, I was ready to start slow cooking anew and eager to make, finally, something spectacular. What else to try but boeuf bourguignon for Sunday supper?

Following the recipe exactly, I soaked dried porcini mushrooms while I cooked bacon, browned beef, and sautéed onions, carrots, and garlic before adding them to the slow-cooker’s insert. To the skillet I added wine, broth, and the strained mushroom soaking liquid and brought the mixture to a boil, scraping up the browned bits before pouring the lot over the meat and vegetables and tossing in a bouquet garni of parsley, thyme, and bay. After a final addition of pearl onions peeled and browned in butter, the stew was ready to cook for eight hours while I went for a walk, worked on my holiday jigsaw puzzle, tidied the house, and made my Sunday phone calls to family.

Taking Canadian Living’s serving suggestion, I mixed up a batter for popovers and slid them in the oven before putting the final touches on the stew by adding sautéed button mushrooms, a splash of brandy, and flour to thicken the sauce. Fifteen minutes later, my partner and I were sitting down to plates of this famous French dish, and the verdict was in. Rich, boldly flavoured, and bound in a thick gravy, we were hard-pressed to discern any significant difference between this slow-cooker version and conventionally made boeuf bourguignon.

Tests with other hearty stew recipes were also quite successful. Chicken with lemon, fennel, and garlic (20 cloves’ worth, which mellow during the long cooking time and melt down into the gravy) is finished with dill and makes for a warming yet light-tasting dish. The braised pork with potatoes and lima beans in a white wine sauce has a side dish built right in; simply fork-mash the potatoes right on your dinner plate.

Vegetarian options, though clearly in the minority, make an appearance in every chapter. We got messy with TVP tacos one night, and main courses such as vegetable curry with chopped eggs and Chinese braised tofu cook up not only well and evenly (thanks again to sautéing before slow cooking) but also quickly (finished in three and four hours, respectively).

International cuisines are well represented, opening up slow cooking to a welcome variety of traditional dishes including pozole, cabbage rolls, choucroute, and ropa veija. Unfortunately, the book’s harira, a lentil and chickpea soup garnished with lemon and dates often served at sundown to break the fast during the Muslim observance of Ramadan, is a miss texturally. Though the soup cooked for the prescribed 6 hours, the lentils remained hard. Even after an additional hour of cooking the lentils retained some crunch. It might be prudent to soften the lentils with the vegetables in the skillet before the slow-cooking process begins.

The Slow Cooker Collection also pushes slow cooking outside the realm of soups, stews, and casseroles. Chapters on appetizers and drinks, side dishes, and desserts provide a range of possibilities. Since I’m not equipped with the small-sized cooker (1-1/2 quarts) required for many of the starters and snacks, I opted to test hot chocolate instead, and was quite delighted to toss squares of semi-sweet chocolate into the cooker with milk and be able to serve steaming mugs enhanced with a touch of vanilla and a cinnamon stick swizzle four hours later to a moving crew working on a frigid Sunday afternoon in January.

Has the Slow Cooker Collection changed the way I feel about my own cooker? Yes. I no longer consider it a no-cooking-required appliance. These recipes, though clear and easy to follow, do require effort. Don't shy away from the labour; with that investment in up-front preparation, a tasty meal will then cook up, unattended, in six to eight hours. No magic here. Just honest slow cooking.

Jodi Lewchuk is an editor by profession and a cook and writer by passion. She also writes about and photographs food for her personal blog, Cursive Mechanics.