The slow cooker chronicles / 2: the first sub-optimal results

Once I had understood what a slow cooker was, I knew I needed to buy one and start experimenting...A blog about American food written by someone who had never used a crock-pot would have not carried any credibility...

The first results I obtained following recipes found here and there were lackluster. They seemed to confirm what I had been told by others, and what I had feared myself: throwing food in a pot, flood it with liquid and cooking it at very low temperatures will surely create something edible. But edible food and good food are two different things entirely.

The solution appeared simple in my mind: let's just do all the prep work that I would normally do for a recipe and THEN, only then, let's throw everything in the slow cooker. By doing this, I thought, you seal the juices in the meat, you develop flavors through a soffritto, you create the basis for everything to come together in the slowcooker.

Armed with my new convictions I set on making ragu, the Italian bolognese sauce. My family recipe calls for ragu to cook for 6-7 hours on a stove, so I thought it was a perfect candidate for the slowcooker. I chose the ragu because I thought that it wouldn't make any sense to try and cook something I had never cooked, or that I wasn't strongly familiar with: I needed to be able to judge the performance of the slowcooked version, comparing it to flavors to something I knew well.

The first result was good, but far, very far from the killer taste that I had always gotten on the stove. I realized I had made two mistakes: I had used far too much water in the slowcooker, and I had added a spicy sausage that altered the flavor. That taught me two valuable lessons: never use US sausages like I used Italian sausages, because their flavors are either too strong or too messed up for my palate. And, more importantly: in the slowcooker you need a lot less liquid than on a stove or in the oven.

In retrospective, this makes a lot of sense. Even the highest temperature settings in a slowcooker are below the lowest temperatures you can get on a stove...so the liquids do not evaporate, especially if you use the slow cooker at the lowest setting, with temperatures far below water's boiling point.

So I ended up with a ragu that was way too liquid, and way too spicy. But I learnt the trick, and next time I cooked a ragu, it came out almost as good as on a stove. The key is in almost. I don't seem to be able to obtain the same texture with the slowcooker than I can obtain on the stove. It is still an excellent ragu, if I may say so myself, but it is just not there. However, when you are not at home, or when you want ragu without having to spend 6-7 hours at home to check the stove and prevent the meat from sticking to the pan, the slowcooker is an excellent companion.

Needless to say I was disappointed. Was the slowcooker simply something capable to save time, while providing less than sub-optimal results? Or was there a way to have meals cooked with the slowcooker that tasted as good as or even better than their stove version?

And this is when three words came to my mind: one was stew; the second one was braising; and the third one was Amazon. And we will talk about them next time...
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