So That’s What They Mean by “Slow Cooking”

Removing the soup bones from my slow cooker this morning, they were melting apart.  Had to scoop them out with a slotted spoon.  The meat glistened with tender silkiness.  It was still early, but I had to try a bite:  Just like the melt-in-your-mouth, slow cooked lamb shanks I’ve had in good restaurants.

So this is how those good chefs transform the toughest cuts into the tenderest and most flavorful dishes.

I’ve known the rule for years:  low and slow.  But in my hurry up world, I tried to do low on a gas stovetop that was calibrated for hot, fast cooking.  My last batch of soup bones came out as tough as leather, even though I had cooked them on low.

Of course it probably didn’t help that I “got things going a little” by bringing the water to boil over high before turning it down to simmer.  And then I left it to simmer on the turbo-burner, not the wimpy simmer burner.  I was in a hurry, you see.  I’d decided at the last minute that the cool day would be a nice one for a last beef stew before summer’s heat settled in.

Thankfully, we’re having yet one more “last” cool spell before summer.  But yesterday morning I heard about the weather blowing in.  So I promptly pulled the last package of soup bones from the freezer and let it thaw all day.  Last night I dumped the bones into my slow cooker, filled it with cold filtered water, put on the lid and turned the heat to low.  Then the truly low heat (with no advance boiling) and the truly long time (12 hours) worked it’s magic.

It's old and dumpy, but it still works magic

Guess there’s something to be said for forethought and patience–and that cheap, completely un-cool and un-designer kitchen appliance called the Crock Pot.

P.S. After removing the soup bones, I threw in celery and carrot tops and some raggedy ends of Egyptian green onions and spring garlic.  They’ll simmer a few hours to add even more goodness to the broth.

How to Make Great Mashed Potatoes

In years past, I never gave potato mashing the attention it deserved. I just threw in a little butter and milk, mashed roughly with a hand masher and took them to the table. This year, I put a little time into experimenting and investigating and found some tricks that easily elevated the mashed potato into a something quite special.

Cooking technique was probably the most important discovery. Typically, potatoes are boiled in salted water for mashed potatoes, which is fine if you don’t use too much water, which tends to “leach out” the flavor. Being moderate with the water, however, makes it easy to burn the potatoes because the water quickly evaporates or gets soaked up by the potatoes–and there is no worse smell, taste or mess than burned potatoes.

Steaming retains the flavor, but it’s also difficult to get the potatoes uniformly soft, especially without scorching the pot.

This recipe uses a slow cooker to avoid these difficulties. The potatoes get soft enough and stay moist enough to make great mashed potatoes, without losing any flavor or running the risk of burning. Plus, you can keep them perfectly warm until just when you’re ready to mash.

The technique is simple: Scrub potatoes and either dry with a clean dish towel or allow to air dry. Place in a 3.5 or 4 qt. oval slow cooker. Cover cooker and cook on high heat, 5-7 hours, until potatoes are very tender (clear to the middle) when stuck with a fork.

When potatoes are done, remove from slow cooker using a large turning fork. Wipe inside of slow cooker with a clean, damp rag, then butter liner. Use a paring knife to cut potatoes into 1-2” cubes and return to slow cooker, then mash as directed in recipe.

What if you forget to put the potatoes on in the morning? The following recipe shares a microwave alternative that is just as good, but a little more time consuming.

P.S. Also note that there’s nothing unhealthy about these mashed potatoes.  The humble potato often gets a bad rap, but that’s usually because it’s combined with silly amounts of butter and cream.  Here, we’re using olive oil in a moderate amount (some is used just for roasting the garlic), we using milk instead of cream and we’re leaving the skins on, where a good portion of the vitamins and minerals reside.  Just don’t eat the whole batch yourself!

Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes

• 1 head garlic, roasted (to make about 2 Tbsp. roasted garlic paste, more or less to taste)
• 3 Tbsp. olive oil, divided
• 1/3 to ½ cup milk or plain soy milk

The night or morning before: Preheat the oven to 350 (F). Rub a head of garlic with about ½ Tbsp. of olive oil. Place inside a garlic roaster or small glass baking dish with a lid. Cover and bake about 45-60 minutes, until garlic head is soft when squeezed from the sides.

To remove the pulp: Once garlic has cooled slightly slice off root end of garlic head with a serrated knife, being sure to slice across every clove. Squeeze garlic from skins. Alternatively, if garlic has cooled completely, the roasted cloves might just pop out whole once the root end of the head is sliced off. Place roasted garlic in cup of immersion blender.

Add remaining olive oil and 1/3 cup milk to garlic and puree with blender. Reserve.

• 2 lbs. Yukon gold potatoes (about 6 medium potatoes)
• Sea salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

Cut unpeeled potatoes into roughly 1-2” cubes, place in casserole dish, drizzle with about 1 Tbsp. olive oil and toss with hands to coat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover dish and microwave in 4-5 minute intervals, stirring after each interval, until potatoes are uniformly tender. It may take as long as 20-30 minutes, depending on your microwave’s power level.

Once potatoes are cooked, transfer to a deep, medium-sized bowl. Mash with a potato masher until fairly smooth. Pour in milk mixture, sprinkle in salt and pepper and mash another minute or so to combine thoroughly. Taste and adjust seasonings, if desired. Add a little more milk if potatoes are too thick.

If potatoes are too lumpy, smooth with an immersion blender (but never a food processor), being careful to use it very briefly so potatoes don’t become gluey. Just go up and down once, through each section of potatoes.

For best results, serve immediately. Enjoy!

Crockpots and Slow Cookers: What Is a Good Slow Cooker Recipe?

In case you haven’t noticed, slow cooker recipes are the latest trend in the cookbook trade.So there’s no problem finding recipes.The problem lies in choosing a couple to actually make.While a lot of that choosing is a matter of personal taste, here’s one thing I’ve learned specific to slow cooker recipes:

Look for recipes that take advantage of a slow cooker’s advantages.

Obviously, if you wanted to make chicken stew, you wouldn’t turn to your countertop grill.Similarly, you wouldn’t turn to your slow cooker for crispy grilled chicken.That’s because specialized kitchen appliances all have their tradeoffs.In other words, being really good at one thing makes it not so good for other things.

Slow cookers, for instance, are really good for:

1. Cooking the heck out of tough characters like stew meat and dried beans, transforming them into melt-in-your mouth goodness.
2. Hands-off cooking, i.e., being able to throw everything in a pot in the morning and forget about it until dinnertime.It’s probably no coincidence that slow cookers became popular when women started working outside the home all day.

The downside of a slow cooker, of course, is that dishes can come out pretty mushy, especially if they include delicate things like sweet peppers, zucchini, asparagus and chicken breasts.

So when you’re looking for slow cooker recipes, don’t fight the machine.Look for recipes with ingredients that require long cooking times, that can be thrown together and left alone, and where a certain amount of “mushing” is not a huge issue.Think classics like pot roasts, stews, soups, chilis and other bean dishes.

This all sounds so self-evident.Why do I even write about it?Because it’s easy to get tripped up by what I call “gourmet slow cooker recipes.”Lately I’ve noticed that many of the newer slow cook recipes have become quite innovative:ethnic chicken dishes, risottos, Cornish game hens, poached salmon, banana cakes.I got all excited about them—until I saw the cooking times:2 hours on HIGH; 4-5 hours on LOW; or LOW 4 hours then HIGH for 30 minutes.

What happened to the “fix it and forget about it” principle?

Here’s my theory:Remember that slow cooker collections are the latest growth category in the cookbook trade?That means a lot of new recipes have to be developed .Necessarily, authors are getting creative, and the tradeoff for more flair is less “fix-it-and-forget-it.”

So as you scout for slow cooker recipes, be mindful of cooking times.If the slow cooker makes good meals feasible because you can turn it on in the morning and walk out the door, then watch out for dishes with odd cooking times.They are better for people who work out of the home or for weekends.

Even if you fall in these categories, it’s worth questioning whether slow cooking is the best option for certain foods like chicken breasts, fish and some of the more tender foods.They are so great cooked fast on the grill or stovetop, why bother using a very slow pot that you can’t control very well?What’s more, cooking them to be moist and succulent requires close watching over their cooking minutes.Achieving such delicious exactitude with a hard-to-control slow cooker would be tedious, if not impossible.

So in my search for slow cooker recipes, I am leery of ones that treat the slow cooker like a glorified stove top pot, since that leaves me suspended in a funny limbo, with a meal that can neither be left alone all day nor cooked in one fell swoop before dinner.

Does this mean those recipes are bad or that I won’t ever use them?Not at all.I’m sure the recipes are delightful, but I will only choose one for my slow cooker repertoire if it benefits my cooking schedule and makes a good meal easier to get on the table.In other words, I’m looking for recipes that take advantage of the slow cooker’s advantages!

Crockpots and Slow Cookers—Invest and Reap the Benefits

If you’re a big time outdoor (or indoor) griller, making meals is pretty easy. You’ve got a few recipes you know by heart, you have the right kind of grill accessories, you automatically stock up on the spices, sauces and meats that are good on the grill, you know what sides to put with a grilled dish and you know what to get at the grocery store.

You can enjoy the same kind of ease with the slow cooker, by just setting yourself up:

• Find a few recipes that work for you, your family, your budget and your health needs.
• Then get the right ingredients at the store and stock the pantry for slow cooking with things like dried beans, broths, onions, potatoes and stew meats.
• Finally, plan a specific night each week or two for experimenting with a slow cooker dish, bearing in mind that it may take a couple tries to adapt a recipe for your tastes. Be sure to note on the recipe any changes you did or would like to make.

No doubt about it: a specialized appliance can make cooking a lot easier, save a lot of time and produce really delicious meals—but only if you first invest a little time getting ready to use it.

Most of us buy an appliance, stick it in a cupboard and then wonder why it’s never seen again. So whether you just got a pressure cooker, panini press, rice cooker or vegetable steamer, here’s the secret to reaping its benefits: Take a few minutes to figure out how to use it, then make at least a semi-concerted effort to start using the darn thing on a somewhat regular basis. That’s how it becomes second nature, like the aforementioned grill.

Tomorrow’s post will talk about the most important investment of all: finding those few good recipes. . . .

Crockpots and Slow Cookers—Why Are They Sitting in the Back Bottom Cupboard?

The idea is perfect: throw a few ingredients into a stoneware crock, turn it on and voila! At the end of the day, you walk in the kitchen and there waits a richly aromatic meal, all cooked and ready to go.

For a lot of people, the great crockpot dream comes true all the time. But it seems that for an equally good number of us, it’s more dream than reality. Of course we all have crockpots, we clearly see their advantages, we want to use them, but we don’t. Hopefully, this blog series will be of some help.

Crockpot or slow cooker?

First off, let’s get the terminology right: “Crock-Pot” is actually the brand name for the slow cooker created by the Rival Company. “Slow cooker” is the correct generic term for these devices. It’s kind of like “Kleenex” and “facial tissues.” So in fairness to the Rival folks, we’ll use the correct generic name.

Isn’t the middle of summer the wrong time to talk about slow cookers?

Seems like it, but one of my clients alerted me otherwise. She loves her slow cooker in the summer because it doesn’t heat up the house. The fact is, even in summer we eat hot cooked meals, so what if they’ve been cooked in a slow cooker instead of a sauté pan?

Also, if you’re serious about taking advantage of your slow cooker, there’s some getting ready to be done. Start gravitating that way now and there’s a good chance you’ll be ready when the weather begins to cool. The next blog will talk about getting ready for slow cooking. . . .