Slow and Steady wins with Taste!!!

Yes, wins the taste...Bravo, Christos...

I am of course referring to the age old art of slow cookery. On our recent trip to our storage unit to drop off our environmentally friendly christmas tree (plastic Canadian Tire tree) and I dug out our old slow cooker. Nothing fancy, not even a shut off timer. But I thought I'd give it a test run. Try to make some fix it and forget it goodness. So far I've made a couple of dishes with it. One was a vegetarian curry recipe I got out of a no name slow cooker magazine. Thoroughly underwhelmed with that one despite my wife and her sister's compliments. I thought they were being generous but they even had seconds; so either vegetarians are use to bland or my tastebuds are losing their subtlety. But the next dish, A mahogany chicken that mimics the flavour of those ducks you see hanging in chinatown windows. This recipe I got out of a slow cooker cookbook from my trusty ole library. Art of the Slow Cooker by Andrew Schloss. I had to make some adjustments due to my lack of various soy sauces and chinese cooking wines. Back with my vegetarian thai experiments light soy was used in place of fish sauce so I reversed the dish and used the fish sauce in soy's place, along with tamari and bragg's aminos and brown sugar, I made something very tasty. Sweet, Salty, Savoury, and dark, right down to the bone, and I am a bone chewer from way back so chewing through the softened bone and taste the brine in the marrow left a very good impression.

Apparently,  because the cooker is always covered, there is no concentration of flavouring liquids as it simmers away. In fact the liquid increases with the juices released from the meat and veg. What happens instead is the liquid impregnates the food in the slow cooker, much like a brine. this may be why hunks of meat took to it better than slices of vegetable. But I'm sure if the flavours in the curry were stronger, it would have worked.

Mr. Schloss tends to skillet fry most of his ingredients for a few minutes before adding them to the cooker. then when the cooking is done, remove the meat and add a thickener like cornstarch, breadcrumbs, instant potato flakes as the recipe suggests, or just simmer the sauce down. At this point, I can figure out what flavours can add a lot to a dish with a slow and low cooking time. So I see great things ahead with my slow cooker.