Crockpot Cooking: Top Three Advantages of This Easy Food Prep Style

If you’ve never tried crockpot cooking, you’re missing out. The food prep method makes life easier in so many ways. Crockpot (sometimes called slow cookers) devotees get it; they most likely have multiple crockpots (maybe even varying sizes of crockpots). We aren’t suggesting that slow cookers are the answer to every cooking task or that you should run out and buy up a handful of crockpots. However, once we show you the top advantages of cooking with this appliance, you may buy more than just a single crockpot.

Crockpot Cooking Keeps the Heat Out of the Kitchen (When it Matters Most)

Using your oven can help warm up your kitchen during the colder months. However, when it’s hot outside – way too hot to fire up the grill and way too hot to turn on the stove; it’s never too hot for crockpot cooking. Unlike an oven or grill, crockpots keep all the heat locked up inside where it belongs: with your food. No matter how horrendous the summer heat, when the air is heavy with humidity, and even the squirrels are panting for air, there’s nothing like throwing your dinner in the crockpot. No hot kitchen, no sweating over a grill in the heat, no ridiculously high cooling bill. . . just perfectly cooked, super tender meats that required minimal effort on the cook’s part that everyone will think it took hours over a stove or grill to prepare.

Cooking in a Crockpot Offers Versatility

The versatility of a crockpot is unbelievable. Typically used for cooking meat or the main course, people often discount crockpots as useful for anything else. We’re here to tell you that crockpots can be used to make yogurt, snacks, desserts, loaves of bread, cakes, and even lasagna is doable in a crockpot! Of course, crockpots are also an ideal cooking appliance for soups and stews.

Slow Cookers are Easy to Use

Although numerous crockpot recipes require quite a bit of prep, many recipes more or less are hands-off. They only need you to plug in your crockpot, drop in your ingredients (which should include our TPJ products), set the temp (for newer crockpot models), or settings like low, medium, or high ( for older models, heck, some only have low or high), place the lid on top and let the slow cooker do its thing. Yep, slow cooker cooking is so easy you don’t even have to marinate when you use a crockpot – just pour your favorite BBQ sauce (we’re sure it’s Craig’s BBQ sauce), or Texas Pepper Jelly, or whatever you’re using over the meat and close the lid.

More Advantages of Cooking in a Crockpot

Need more proof of how great slow cooker cooking is? Here you go, more reasons to love a crockpot.

• Slow cookers are excellent for tenderizing tough, fatty cuts of meat like pork shoulder (often called a pork butt), chuck roasts, and short ribs.
• When you use a crockpot, the nutrients remain in the food, not dispersed in cooking.
• Crockpot cooking reduces or eliminates the possibility of overcooking foods that you may experience when frying or boiling.
• Crockpots are easy to clean out because the lower temps don’t bake food onto the insert.
• Slow cookers keep warm setting allows you to serve foods without reheating them.
• Crockpots don’t require your constant attention, so you have more time to do other things.

Cooking with a crockpot is an excellent way to prepare meals with little attention, energy, and cleanup. Sounds like a win-win-win to us.

One of our Favorite Crockpot Recipes

To get you started with your crockpot, here is one of our favorite recipes to slow cook. Pineapple Habanero Crockpot Chicken. Try it. We know you’ll love this recipe as much as we do. You can find this and other recipes under the recipe tab in the menu above.