![]() ![]() The concept of slow cooking is simple: Put food into some sort of container or contained area and let it cook slowly. This small electric appliance, a staple of many homes for more than 30 years, is based on the principles of slow cooking. Luckily, you've prepared for today and can walk into your home and be welcomed by the scent of a stew wafting through the air, enticing you to a warm dinner.Įven though no one's been home, your meal is just about ready thanks to your slow cooker. The pressure release is the loudest part of the process at 81dB.It's another cold one out there, and after a long hard day at work, the last thing you want to do is slave over the stove to cook a decent supper. The broccoli pieces that remained on the rack were a little overdone for our tastes, but the duration can be adjusted as you get to know the cooker. Disappointingly, some broccoli florets slipped through the bars of the steam rack into the water below, boiling rather than steaming - we’d have preferred a steam basket, which is included with some multi-cookers. We set it to two minutes for our broccoli florets and with the nine minutes it took to preheat plus the two-minute steam release, that’s a 13 minute total cook time. The steam function is easy to use and there’s a handy chart in the instruction manual detailing duration for various vegetables. We did find it was fiddly to slide the bowl in and out of the cooker t - unless you’re precise in lifting directly upwards, it can get stuck. But the rice was perfectly cooked, not sticky or wet and we didn’t suffer with grains sticking to the bottom of the cooking bowl either. The preheat took seven minutes and the natural pressure release took a further 10 minutes, taking the total cook time up to 32 minutes, which is longer than when you cook it on the hob. To cook brown basmati rice we used the preset rice function which pressure cooks and followed the rice to water ratios as advised in the instruction manual, increasing the cooking duration to 15 minutes to take into account brown rice takes longer to cook than white rice. The small booklet has some recipes to get you started but you’ll need to be willing to experiment with times and settings for other meals. There are also a range of preset pressure programs for common foods, which give you an idea of settings while you’re getting to know the cooker. The interface is clearly laid out and simple to use, there’s a keep warm function and a delay timer as well as easily adjustable time, temperature and pressure settings. The functions available include pressure cook, steam, slow cook, brown/sauté, and as we’ve already mentioned the US model has additional simmer and boil functions. The 6-quart/ 5.6-liter cooking pot has a non-stick coating and although it’s dishwasher safe Crock-Pot recommends hand washing to protect the coating, the lid and all of its parts also have to be hand washed. ![]() At 13.4 x 13.2x 14.8 inches/ 34 x 34 x 38cm (h x w x d) it’s a pretty standard size, but other than a small rack and spoon it doesn’t come with any additional accessories, so there’s not lots of extra stuff to store. While the list price is lower than many of its competitors, the Crockpot Express doesn’t look like a budget model, it has a neat stainless-steel exterior and a flat touch control panel.
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