instantpot

Cooking with a slow cooker

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A photo of our Instant Pot, which we use as a slow cooker. In front of it are several slow cooker cookbooks

Typically every other week, we have a slow-cooked meal at home. Along with sous vide cooking, which I wrote about last month, slow cooking a form of low temperature cooking where the food isn’t heated as much, but cooked for longer.

We use our Instant Pot as a slow cooker. During my blogging hiatus, I wrote on Medium why a multi-cooker is a good slow cooker. The gist of it being that you can use its timer features both to delay the start, and reduce the cooking temperature at the end to keep the food warm. However, the Instant Pot’s sauté mode is also helpful, if you need to pre-fry ingredients before starting the slow cooker timer. It’s not perfect, and there are some things that you need to bear in mind when using an Instant Pot as a slow cooker, as the temperature modes are not always comparable.

We used to have a dedicated slow cooker, but it was basic, and took up space that we needed for the more capable Instant Pot. The most basic models have one heat setting and turn on as soon as they’re plugged in, but many include multiple temperature settings and timers now.

Benefits of using a slow cooker

To me, there are several benefits of using a slow cooker over cooking meals using ‘traditional’ high heat methods.

The first of these is cost. Generally, it will cost less to run a slow cooker, even for several hours, than a hob or an oven for a shorter period. This is especially true for us, as we have solar panels – a slow cooker lets us do the majority of cooking during daylight hours with our free solar energy. In the winter, it’s dark when we get home after work and, even with a home battery, the amount of energy needed to run an oven means that we have to pay to use grid energy. I suspect that the cost of living crisis is one reason why slow cooking has become more popular in recent years.

Many slow cooker recipes simply require you to put the ingredients in the slow cooker, and leave it. They’re therefore quick to prepare, with no need to stir or keep an eye on a pan. You can put the ingredients in and turn the slow cooker on before leaving for work, and come home to a delicious meal that doesn’t require any work. If I’m working at home, I tend to put slow cooker meals on during my lunch break. Friends of mine who have issues with chronic fatigue find slow cooker recipes really beneficial, as it means they have something to eat at the end of the day which doesn’t require preparation, even when they’ve run out of spoons.

As with other low temperature cooking methods like sous vide, slow cooking is great for tenderising tougher cuts of meat like brisket. Coincidentally, these tend to be the cheaper cuts, and so you can save money this way too.

Not just soups and casseroles

There’s a perception that you can only use slow cookers for liquid-based meals like soups, stews, curries and casseroles. That’s not actually the case, and you can cook a wide variety of meals if you layer the ingredients correctly. In some cases, you essentially steam-cook ingredients that sit on top of others. Some recipes allow you to add rice, noodles or pasta shortly before the end, so that you can cook an entire meal in one pot.

That being said, one thing you are not going to get from using a slow cooker is anything crispy. That crispiness comes about thanks to the Maillard reaction, which usually requires cooking temperatures of at least 115°C. Even on their highest settings, slow cookers do not get as high as that. As such, some recipes call for ingredients like meat to be flash fried before or after slow cooking.

Slow cooker cookbooks

Last summer, I wrote about our go-to cookbooks, which included Nathan Anthony’s Bored of Lunch book (sponsored link). He has also written a follow-up – Bored of Lunch – Even Easier (sponsored link) which I’ve included in the photo above. We don’t use this as often as the first book, but there’s a nice recipe for Butter Chicken in there which uses yoghurt rather than cream. We also picked up his latest book, 6 Ingredient Slow Cooker (sponsored link), last weekend. It looks good but we’ve not attempted any of the recipes in there yet.

The first slow cooker book we bought was Slow Cooker Heaven by Lorna Brash (sponsored link) which is published by The National Trust. There are some good recipes in there, but they’re quite involved – some of them require a lot of preparation prior to turning the slow cooker on, or ask you to make your own spice mixes from scratch.

More recently we’ve picked up Poppy Cooks – The Actually Delicious Slow Cooker cookbook (sponsored link) by Poppy O’Toole. Poppy is apparently the ‘potato queen of Tiktok’, and used to be a professional chef before ending up out of work due to the Covid lockdown in 2020. Her recipes are generally also quite simple, and a little more authentic. We’ve cooked quite a few recipes from this book recently – Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs probably being my favourite.

For us, slow cooking tends to work best if I’m either working at home, or if Christine is working on a weekend. In the latter case, she can be held up and may not finish until 7pm, in which case it’s great coming home knowing that dinner can be ready and on the table within a few minutes, and with little effort.

Sous vide cooking in an Instant Pot

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An Instant Pot Duo Plus set to sous vide mode with 29 hours and 49 minutes left to run

If you have one of the higher tier models of Instant Pot, then you may well have a ‘sous vide’ button on it. We’ve used sous vide cooking a few times with our Instant Pot Duo Plus to make tasty meals, as it’s relatively easy to do.

Sous vide is French for ‘under vacuum’. Essentially, to cook something using the sous vide method, you put it in a vacuum-sealed bag, and then put it in a heated water bath (also known as a bain marie) inside your Instant Pot. Depending on the recipe, this can be quite quick, or take many hours. In the photo example, we were cooking some beef brisket for 30 hours.

There’s some instructions for how to set your Instant Pot to sous vide here. As well as setting the cooking time, you also need to set the temperature, using the buttons or dial on the front of your Instant Pot. Once it’s going, we use a glass lid (sponsored link) that we bought separately rather than the pressure cooker lid, so that you can see inside.

Sous vide without an Instant Pot

The sous vide cooking technique has been around since 1974, when it was pioneered by a French chef (hence the name). But the need to keep the water at a constant temperature means that it’s a difficult technique for home cooks to adopt without specialist equipment. You need something that forms a feedback loop between a temperature gauge, and the heat source. Of course, you could probably have a thermometer inside the bain marie and constantly adjust the heat yourself, but this isn’t feasible for recipes that take a long time. Thankfully, many models of Instant Pot will provide this feedback loop as part of their sous vide feature, so you can set and leave it.

If you don’t have an Instant Pot, or you have a more basic model without a sous vide mode, Amazon will sell you a sous vide wand (sponsored link) for around £50 that you can pop in your bain marie. The wand will provide the heat and measure the temperature. More advanced models can be configured with a smartphone app – a friend has such a model. It lets you set how well-cooked you want a piece of steak, for example, and sets the time and temperature accordingly.

Vacuum sealing

The other aspect of sous vide cooking is that you should vacuum seal your food, before it goes in the bain marie. We bought our vacuum sealer from the middle aisle of Lidl, of all places – in fact, it was a Lidl in France, and so we have to use a UK plug adaptor with it. Again, if you need a vacuum sealer, Amazon will sell you one for around £23 (sponsored link), and expect to pay £11-£15 for two rolls of bags.

If you don’t want to buy one, then you may get away with just a regular plastic food bag with as much air squeezed out of it as possible.

What we’ve cooked using sous vide

I’m mentioned that we’ve cooked beef brisket using the sous vide technique, and indeed we’ve done so more than once. Brisket contains a lot of connective tissue, and so you need to use slower cooking methods to allow this tissue to break down. Sous vide is perfect for this, and after 30 hours, you’ll end up with a very meaty piece of meat.

We’ve also done duck confit this way, which then went into a cassoulet. Again, this was a long and slow recipe, taking around 12 hours with the cooking temperature set to 75° C.

It’s worth noting that, whilst you can cook steak using the sous vide method, you won’t get any browning on the outside. If this is something you want, then you’ll still need to flash fry the meat at a higher heat after it’s come out of the bain marie.

In summary, sous vide cooking, whilst requiring some forward planning and investing in the correct equipment, is also relatively easy. You can prepare some really tasty food ahead of time, and have it cook slowly at a regulated temperature. Plus, because the food is vacuum sealed, it’s a less messy way of cooking too. We don’t do it very often, but the few times we have done it have always been worth it.