That brings me to an important point when it comes to slow cooking: as when cooking in a pressure cooker, there is very little evaporation and therefore very little concentration of flavors. I tried to make a brasato al vino rosso, for example-the very first dish I tried in my new slow cooker-and found the meat rather stringy and the sauce thin and bland.

Stews and pot roasts, for example, have not turned out as I would have liked. Not everything I’ve made so far has been a smashing success, however. So far, I’ve had excellent results with broth, beans (look out for coming posts!) and, as I will get to in a moment, polenta and ragù. But once you’re down with the initial steps (in the Italian context, that mean making a soffritto and the rosolatura of the main ingredient) you can leave whatever you’re making unattended until it’s done.

What it is not, as the name implies, is quick. And, yes, it is also convenient: it frees up your stove for other uses, can be left on all day if you like, and will keep your food warm indefinitely. All kinds of dishes that you would want to simmer for hours on end: rich sauces, broths and, yes, beans-all come out wonderfully in a slow cooker. I have promised you, dear readers, to share with you my impressions, so here goes.I realize now that a slow cooker, though marketed as a convenience tool-usually the kiss of death in my book-is really just another way to achieve the kind of gentle most cooking that most cooks will do in a Dutch oven or, in Italy, a terracotta pot. (By the way, if you don’t have these books, I would heartily recommend both of them!) I had to see what everyone was talking about.

And then I started reading Ad Hoc At Home, by perhaps American’s most respected chef, Thomas Keller, in which he mentions the slow cooker as one of his prized kitchen tools, in particular for beans. Then came Michele Scicolone’s Italian Slow Cookercookbook and my resolve began to waiver. The Crock Pot craze of the ’70s, which brought us some pretty awful cooking (a can of this, a can of that…) was still seared into my memory banks.īut I started hearing about ‘slow cookers’ from cooks that I liked and admired. The thought of owning one had never really occurred to me before. Some of you will have read in a recent post that I finally broke down and bought a slow cooker, a kitchen device also known in the States-to those of you who are old enough-as a ‘Crock Pot’.

Slow cooker sausages coming out hard