Braise & Sear

Too long. Thighs are forgiving compared with breast, but they are not beef chuck, and six hours on low is well past where they are best.

Boneless thighs in a sauce are done at about three to four hours on low, or roughly two on high. Past that the muscle fibres keep squeezing out moisture and you get exactly what you describe, meat that shreds but is dry, which is a different thing from meat that pulls apart and is juicy.

Three fixes:

• cook the rest of the dish for its full time and add the thighs for the last three hours
• use bone in, skin on thighs, which take longer to go stringy and give the sauce far more body. Pull the skin off before serving if you do not want it
• leave the meat in the sauce rather than lifting it out to rest. Chicken out of the sauce dries within minutes

It is undercooked, not overcooked. This trips up almost everybody because tough meat feels like a sign you cooked it too long.

What makes chuck pull apart is collagen turning to gelatin, and that needs the meat to be up around 90 to 96C and then to stay there for a while. Reaching temperature is not enough, it is time at temperature that does the work. A two kilo roast that is still sliceable at eight hours has simply not spent long enough in that zone.

Put it back on for another two hours and check again. On low, a piece that size often wants ten to twelve hours, especially if it went in fridge cold.

The test I use is not a thermometer, it is a fork. Push a fork into the thickest part and twist. If it turns with almost no resistance, it is done. If it grips, it needs longer. Meat at 88C and meat at 94C feel completely different to a fork and identical on a probe.

This is worth doing once for any cooker you own. Mine was 12 degrees cooler on low than a friend's identical looking model from a different decade, and we had spent an evening arguing about recipes that were both correct for our own machines.

The lid is the whole story. An oven braise loses a lot of liquid to evaporation over three hours, and the recipe quantities assume that. A slow cooker seals, condenses the steam on the lid and drips it straight back in, so nothing leaves. On top of that, onions, peppers, mushrooms and meat all release a lot of water that has nowhere to go.

So when you convert an oven recipe, cut the liquid to about a third of what is written, not a half, and expect the level to rise during cooking rather than fall.

For fixing it at the end, in order of how much I like the result:

• pour the liquid into a wide pan and boil it down hard for five to ten minutes, then pour it back. Best flavour by a distance.
• take the lid off for the last 45 minutes on high. Slow, but requires no extra washing up.
• a cornstarch slurry, one tablespoon of starch to two of cold water, stirred in for the last 20 minutes on high. Thickens without concentrating flavour, which is the trade off.

The thin flavour is the same problem. Water diluted it, so reducing fixes both at once.

Oval, and it is not close for how you cook.

The reason is what fits inside. A whole chicken, a rolled joint, a rack of short ribs or a loaf tin all sit properly in an oval and none of them do in a round. A round cooker forces you to cut things up, which is fine for stews and annoying for everything else.

The capacity question is less important than it looks because these machines want to be between half and two thirds full. An eight quart cooker doing a two person batch is running at a quarter full, and food in a thin layer over a large hot base scorches at the edges and overcooks. You would effectively be buying capacity you cannot use.

Six quart oval for two people who batch cook is close to the ideal size. You can fill it properly with a batch that feeds you for five days.

This matches everything I have cooked. Anything acidic goes in late: tomatoes, vinegar, wine, molasses in baked beans. The classic long baked bean recipes work around exactly this problem.

One safety point specific to slow cookers, since it comes up with beans. Red kidney beans need a proper hard boil for about ten minutes before slow cooking, because a slow cooker on low may never get hot enough to break down the compound in raw kidney beans that makes people ill. Pintos are far lower risk, but boiling any soaked bean hard for ten minutes on the stove before it goes in costs nothing and also gets the cook started.