Slow cookers are easy & forgiving cooking devices. It is almost impossible to accidentally overcook your meal in a slow cooker. Nor do you need to know the finer details of culinary science or a corpus of fancy recipes.

If you just know a few basics, you can easily improvise your way through any slow cooker meal.

I once knew a Sicilian man who claimed to be a “jazz chef” in that he sort-of made things up as he went along. But there was a method to his madness, based on his detailed knowledge (and hands-on experience) of various spices and combinations thereof. Because of this, he was able to take just about any type of leftover and make a whole new type of pasta dish out of it that tasted authentically Italian.

This is the method you must adopt if you want to make full use of your slow cooker's potential. You must make it your business to get an understanding of common spices & herbs, and what mixes well with what types of food. Once you have that under your belt, you will be able to work with just about any base ingredients available, and do a lot more on a budget than you ever thought possible.

While many basic slow cooker recipes have you throw everything in at once, that kind of lazy cooking can only get you so far. Once you start trying to manifest complex sauce bases, you will find the final product less than satisfactory. Getting things like tomato sauce or beans to absorb seasonings is oftentimes a 12-24 hour affair - a timeframe that tends to 'boil out' the flavor of other ingredients. Delicate ingredients (like basil & green onion for example) should be added towards the end.

As you experiment with your slow cooker, you will get an idea or what to add when. If one ingredient feels too mushy, add it later in the process next time around. Some of the recipes on this page should point you in the right direction.

This one should go without saying, but you're obviously going to get a better result if you cook with better ingredients. Fresh produce, for example, is always going to be better than frozen, and frozen is always going to be better than canned. Assemble a collection of real spices so you don't have to rely on premix blends loaded with garbage. Use tallow, lard & olive oil instead of industrial seed oils. Simple as.

Why yes Anon, there are absolutely many tricks you can deploy to accentuate your slow cooker meals:

I rarely dump meat straight into a slow cooker. For ground meats like sausage, I lightly brown it real quick in a frying pan to render some of the fat out, then dump the meat and the delicious flavor juice both right into the slow cooker. Sometimes I do this process with a whole minced onion or minced garlic.

If I'm slow cooking whole cuts like pot roasts, I'll sear them real quick, on a grill if possible, but a frying pan works just as well. Here, instead of rendering fat, we're locking in juices & flavor. (If you're familiar with St. Louis style BBQ, you will understand the science of this one.)

This step I'll sometimes do later on if it's going to be a long cooking process. If I'm making a spaghetti sauce or chili where ingredients like tomato sauce or beans require a substantial amount of time to absorb spices, I might let those slowly simmer away for 12 hours before adding the meat & whatever greases I browned it in.

I find that when these two hat tricks are combined, they not only improve the overall texture of the meat, but help the meat retain more flavor and really drive the dish home.

Beans are great cheap protein, and the slow cooker is really one of the best ways to make use of them. That's because they take forever to cook. Even if you are working with pre-cooked canned beans, it may very well take all day for them to absorb the seasonings in the slow cooker. Plan accordingly.

Dry beans take even longer, as they have to be soaked overnight. I generally let them sit in a covered bowl of water for 24 hours beforehand. If the water gets murky really fast, I might change the water out at the 12 hour mark. After that, you have to briefly boil them to kill the compounds that cause indigestion, as most slow cookers do not get hot enough to do this. 10 minutes is all it takes. Rinse them with clean water between soaking and boiling, and then rinse them again before adding them to the slow cooker.

Even canned beans should be rinsed. They do not need to soak, but you should empty the cans out into a colander and rinse off all the foul preservative-laden juices they came packaged with. Frozen beans too, give them a quick rinse to get the freezer-flavored frost off of them. Your final product will be much better as a result.

Some chilis & sauces I have found benefit from an overnight “chill stage” in the fridge, before being put on the slow cooker again for another day. I don't know why this is, but it is something I have noticed and sometimes make use of if I have time.