7 Smart Slow-Cooker Tricks That Make Everything Taste Better

One of my daughter’s first words was “cooker.” She soon graduated to “Dat your cooker, Mommy?” This was just the natural consequence of a toddlerhood spent surrounded by slow-cookers—three slow-cookers crammed onto the kitchen counter, two more on the dining room table, and one or two bubbling away on the floor in the hallway. I spent more than a year developing and testing (and testing and testing) recipes for my new cookbook, Adventures in Slow Cooking. At my peak, I had eight slow-cookers in a two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment that's probably the size of your average suburban garage.

I knew slow-cookers were good for braising meat, and I figured that was about it. Then I worked on a story at Food & Wine with the modernist chef Grant Achatz, who told me he uses slow-cookers to make delicate steamed custards at his restaurants, and to make whole grain and vegetable ragouts at home. Armed with Achatz's enthusiasm and his ideas for slow-cooked savory custards and perfect polenta and sticky toffee pudding, I went home and dragged out my cooker. I started tinkering with ways to make slow-cooker cooking more delicious and more foolproof and I haven’t stopped since.

I know that there are mornings when there’s just no time to do anything other than put some meat and vegetables directly into the slow-cooker and hope for the best at the end of the day. But armed with a few key techniques—most of which add only 10 minutes of work—you can make anything that comes out of your slow-cooker taste exponentially better. Here are some of the easiest, best ways to get the most out of your slow-cooker.

“Aromatics” is just a fancy word for the ingredients that form the flavor base of a dish, like onion, carrot, celery, garlic, and ginger. In most stovetop cooking, those ingredients get sautéed in oil before you proceed with the dish. Think about even the most basic chicken soup, for instance: You always start by sautéing an onion. This accomplishes two things: One, it reduces the moisture in the onion and breaks down its fibers so it will melt into the dish. Two, as the onion browns, it develops deep, sweet flavor and infuses the oil with that flavor, too.

Many slow-cooker recipes instruct you to just throw the onion and other aromatics into the cooker with the other ingredients before turning it on, but often that means you’ll end up with bits of onion that never get soft. And a raw onion can swamp a dish with moisture. If you take an extra 10 minutes to sauté the aromatics before scraping them into the slow-cooker, the finished dish will have deeper flavor and better texture. (And some new slow-cookers allow you to sauté right in the insert, so you don’t have to wash a separate skillet.)

Recipe: Shakshuka with Feta and Olives. Brown the onion first and then toast the spices quickly before putting it all in the slow-cooker.

The easiest proteins to slow-cook are the ones that improve with a long cook time—that’s tough, fatty cuts like pork shoulder and chuck roast. It’s generally not a great idea to put fish or chicken breast in the slow-cooker for hours and hours—delicate proteins will get super dry or just fall apart.

But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with pulled pork five nights a week. The best way to cook fish and chicken breast in the slow-cooker is to gently poach them in a flavorful oil. Chicken breast cooked this way is velvety, juicy, and dense. Tuna is lush. The oil doesn’t soak into the protein in any meaningful amount, so it’s not greasy or heavy, just perfectly cooked. I like to infuse olive oil with garlic and herbs all day long on the warm heat setting. Come home, slip some fish into the cooker, and 10 minutes later, dinner’s done. The infused oil can be mixed with a squeeze of lemon juice for an instant sauce.

In the book, I have a recipe for 'Luxury Chicken Breasts' that goes something like this: Infuse olive oil with garlic, bay leaves, thyme, rosemary, and lemon. Forty minutes before you want to eat, slip brined chicken breasts into the oil and gently poach them until velvety.

Slow-cooker manufacturers will tell you to never, ever cook with the lid open. That’s because they can’t guarantee the cooking temperature will rise high enough for food safety, which matters quite a lot when it comes to cooking chicken or meat. But in certain, carefully controlled circumstances, leaving the lid cracked about an inch ajar is a great idea: It allows for moisture to evaporate out, so you end up with, say, a thick tomato sauce instead of of a watery one. You can do this with tomato sauce, fruit butter, apple sauce, or even to make crunchy snacks, like Chex mix.

Recipe: Winter Tomato Sauce. After getting the sauce steaming hot by cooking it for an hour on high, crack the lid and let it slow-cook on low for five more hours, until it’s thick and rich.

Older slow-cookers have warm, low, and high settings that you have to toggle on manually. Most new slow-cookers are programmable, meaning you can set the cooker to cook for, say 6 hours on low and then when the cook time has elapsed, the cooker will auto-switch to warm, which should drop the temperature to about 150 degrees. This is a very useful function for a lot of reasons—most importantly, it helps prevent overcooking if you aren’t able to get home when the dish is done.

The warm setting isn’t really meant to be a cook setting, but I found that it can be used as an extra-low-temperature finishing step for certain dishes. For instance, I really wanted to be able to offer some breakfast dishes that could cook for at least eight hours, or overnight. But I found that when I cooked steel-cut oats for that long on low, sometimes the edges burned. I had the same problem with stratas (savory bread puddings). I figured out that the way around this problem was to use that 'warm' setting as part of the actual cook time. You can start certain dishes on low or high to get their temperatures up, and then finish cooking them on warm.

There's an apple spice overnight oatmeal recipe in the book that does exactly this. You mix oats, applesauce, water and spices in a slow-cooker, and then slow-cook it all according to when you plan to eat. If you want it to cook overnight, set the cooker to low heat for two hours and then let it auto-switch to warm for six to seven more hours. If you want it sooner, you can simply cook it for four hours on low.

Slow-cooking mellows the flavors of ingredients. That can be great—think of the sweetness of roasted garlic versus the bite of fresh garlic, for instance. It can also be a problem, and it’s why some people think all slow-cooked food tastes kind of the same. I think it’s just another variable to be aware of: You just have to be mindful of how you finish the dish. First, think of the flavor profile of what you’re cooking. Is it lemony and herby? Add a big squeeze of lemon juice, maybe some lemon zest, and a handful of herbs before serving. Is it garlicky and spicy? Add a pinch of crushed chile and some grated garlic just warmed in olive oil.

Mellow is great, and there’s a real depth of flavor that comes from a long, gentle simmer. But for balance in the finished dish, carefully punch one or two flavors back up—it’ll make the dish taste vivid.

I make a spicy kimchi and pork ramen by simmering pork and a bunch of kimchi together until the pork is tender and the kimchi is sweet and mellow. Then, before serving, I add another handful of fresh chopped kimchi to add a strong, spicy, acidic note.

Slow-cookers work with a moist, low heat, and that moisture means that nothing gets crisp. You can sometimes get a little browning or caramelization around the edges, but if you’re looking for, say, crunchy chicken skin—otherwise known as the entire point of roast chicken—it’s not going to happen in the slow-cooker.

There’s an easy fix: The broiler. A quick run under an intense flame will give you crisp skin on slow-cooked roast chicken, or a little char on braised eggplant, or delicious caramelized bits on gochujang-spiced pork.

Recipe: Miso-Butter Roast Chicken and Potatoes. After cooking a whole bird in your slow-cooker, cut it into pieces, rub it with a mixture of miso and honey, and sizzle it under the broiler, skin-side up.

Convenience comes in many forms, and a slow-cooker can simplify your life in more ways than an eight-hour cook time. One of my favorite things to do is slow-cook a big batch of whole grains, or lentils, or beans, or stock, or winter greens. Any of these elements in your fridge can help make quick work of a week’s worth of lunches or dinners.

Whole grains are especially great in the slow-cooker. To make steamed farro: Put farro and water into a slow-cooker, press a sheet of foil on top of the grains (this keeps everything equally moist and prevents the grains on top from drying out), cover, and cook on high for one and a half hours. Now you have perfectly steamed farro for grain bowls all week long!

For more smart slow-cooker tips and 120 truly delicious recipes, check out Adventures in Slow Cooking ($24.99).

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