The Great American Slow Cooker Book (25 page)

Breakfasts and soups are all well and good, but chances are you didn’t get a slow cooker to make whole-grain porridges and chicken noodle soup. You bought it because of a promise: that you could put a cut of beef or pork in there, set the lid on tight, cook it all day on low, and morph that hunk of meat into dinner.

There’s no doubt about it: a slow cooker can render pork ribs perfect, chuck roasts splendid, and lasagna easy. To that end, you’ll find dozens of recipes for every cut that’s fit for the appliance: brisket, pot roast, pork loin, pork shoulder, plus lots more. And that’s not to mention what the machine can do for lamb, mellowing its more aggressive flavor considerably during the long cooking. There’s little to worry about in most of these recipes: just make sure the lid fits tightly and walk away.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing to do. While this chapter is full of easy recipes for every night of the week, as well as plenty that are
worthy of your next dinner party, it also reveals a fundamental problem when it comes to cooking meat in a slow cooker: the distinct lack of browning. Short ribs cooked over eight hours on low heat will end up gray—not all fifty shades of it, but close enough to be unappetizing.

Browned meat tastes better. Searing a cut snaps apart the relatively tasteless long-chain proteins into more delectable bits, caramelizing the meat’s natural sugars and giving the cut more flavor and aroma—and offering us an all-around better dinner.

That said, browning is not just about adding good taste to meat; it also solves a culinary problem for our favorite appliance. Unbrowned
ground
meat can clump, morphing into blobs and chunks in the slow cooker. While that’s all well and good when it comes to meatballs and some casseroles, it’s nobody’s idea of a good pasta sauce. So ground beef often has to be browned to improve not only its taste but also its texture.

Some people resist the very notion of cranking up the stove at 7:30 in the morning before they head out the door for work or school, but almost no one regrets it at 7:30 that evening, when dinner is far tastier and finished with minimal effort. The slow cooker is not some sort of magic DIY hard hat into which you dump everything only to pull out dinner by the ears eight hours later. Yes, the slow cooker braises—and as you’ll see, even roasts—very well. But we have to compensate for its deficits. So have a go at the stove before you dump everything into the cooker, even if you do this task in your PJs. (Never brown naked, for obvious reasons.)

This chapter starts off with lots of beef recipes, arranged mostly by cuts: ground beef, then various round steaks, followed by briskets, pot roasts, and short ribs. Next, there’s a section on pork, again arranged by cuts, starting with pork chops and the pork loin, then working through various cuts to end up at ground pork. We follow all that up with lamb recipes, and then a section on veal and rabbit.

Our best advice is to stock up on all sorts of meat when you see it on sale at the supermarket. A full freezer means easier meals in the weeks ahead. And better ones, too, with just a little work at the stove once in a while.

There’s a great and sure divide in cuts of beef. The line runs between the quick-cookers (for example, the tenderloin and most steaks fit for the grill) and the long-cookers (brisket, arm roasts, and beef ribs, to name a few). As the modern world has set in with a vengeance and recipes have required less and less time to complete, the first category has become more popular—and more expensive, to boot. A stack of New York strip steaks will take another chunk out of your IRA account.

Meanwhile, the long-cookers sit in the meat case, often at deep discounts if you catch the sales right (look right after holidays). And sure, briskets may make an appearance at summer holidays, when they’re headed for the smoker, or at fall dinners, when they become a long-braised pot roast. But most of these cuts don’t fit our modern lifestyles. We love steaks—and since the bulk of the cow isn’t steak, the rest of the beast is divided into cuts your grandmother knew well, the cuts stocked with connective tissue and collagen. But this is the good stuff, arguably more flavorful than any strip steak around. Still, these cuts need moist heat and several hours to become luscious. Who has the time?

You do. The slow cooker is the perfect remedy. It tenderizes the toughness over a long cooking time. Why fight the machine’s success? Especially when you can have a tasty (and economical) meal on an average Tuesday night.

So you won’t find any rib-eyes or hanger steaks among these offerings. A well-done filet mignon from a slow cooker? What a waste. Rather, you’ll find lots of ground beef recipes, as well as plenty more for short ribs and chuck roasts, plus even more ideas for the whole range of what the cow provides, from round steaks to beef ribs, arm roast to oxtail.

That being said, these cuts have a few weaknesses. After cooking meat over open flame for millennia, we humans have lost our ability to taste raw proteins. When it comes
to steak tartare or beef carpaccio, we have to gussy them up with chopped onion, mustard, and other condiments. But once we subject beef to the heat, even for a few moments, we experience the meat as tastier. And that’s good news, since there are few possibilities for rare meat when there’s a slow cooker at work. After all, you’re going to put the pot roast or brisket or short ribs in for many hours—and although the slow cooker may indeed keep the color pink, the meat will nonetheless be cooked through, taken at least to 160°F, maybe higher, and well beyond any understanding of rare or medium-rare.

Not wanting to kick against such obvious goads, our section on beef from the slow cooker is full up with stews and braises, comfort food galore. And despite caveats about browning that meat or the impossibility of a rare steak from a slow cooker, this may be the best news we have. You can make a deep braise without much fuss. There’s an old rule in some culinary circles: people crave what they can’t have—barbecue in the winter and stews in the summer. The slow cooker just might render that rule irrelevant. You can braise in any season without heating up your kitchen. And if the dish is made with a chuck roast or short ribs, it won’t break your budget. What’s to stop beef from being dinner tonight on your table?