Re: Slow Cooker Problems

Brogden Fields wrote on 15 Sep 2006 in rec.food.cooking

I have just bought a slow cooker and tried a recipe for paprika beef.
The recipe said to fry the onions and brown the beef first, and get
everyting simmering before transferring to the slow cooker, but the
manual said that the browning step could be omitted if time was tight.
Because I wanted to put everything on before I went to work I put the
raw sliced onions in the bottom of the pot, put the diced beef
(straight from the fridge) and other bits on top, covered the whole lot
with boiling water and put it on low.

Eleven hours later it smelled great! However, the beef was not as
tender as I expected, and was also quite dry, and the onions were tough
and stringy. I was very disappointed.

I don't really want to have to part cook things before putting them in
the pot because I can't do this in the time available in the morning
before going to work, so what can I do to get better results?



First off...you can do the browning step the night before and put the
whole covered crock liner in the fridge. Next the browning isn't critical
in cooking the food, big but here...the browning adds loads of flavour
though. So browning is total up to you. Sometime I brown sometimes I
don't.

Next without a recipe how can anybody see where you or the recipe failed.

I think either you didn't set the crockpot up properly or there was a
power outage. Either that or it's a broken crockpot. It is easy to race
outa the house and not set it up properly.

These days crockpots need to set...temp to cook at (high or low)...number
of hours to cook for that sort of thing. After cooking at the temp
setting for the time selected the crock defaults to keep warm. A power
outage will make it default to keep warm. I'm not sure but believe high
is around 260 to 300F and low is 200-250F. And keep warm is around 160F
or so.

I on occassion throw a frozen rack of spareribs in my crockpot and a
little bbq sauce and maybe a sliced onion....after ten hours set on low
everything is fall off the bone tender. It isn't a gourmet meal but it
tastesa ok on those crazy lazy days.



--


Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect

-Alan
.

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