CrockPot or Crock?

As many of you know, I’ve been testing my recipes for my upcoming Slow Cooker book in a 5-quart Rival CrockPot. The testing has gone great. I even went so far as to purchase 4 of these larger style cookers to be able to try a few recipes at once.

The next natural step was to try to scale the recipes down to a 3 1/2 slow cooker, which I think makes a lot more sense for folks that are single…that don’t want a lot of leftovers laying around…or that are just testing out their hand with a slow cooker.

I was ecstatic when I found a Rival 3 1/2 quart slow cooker at Target for $14.99. Folks – take my experience to heart and don’t go the Rival rout in this category of sizes. The lid on the smaller one is obviously lighter than the larger-sized lid and rattles around while cooking. That I could handle. What I couldn’t handle was the release of steam.

I realized the problem one morning when I came downstairs to find a puddle under the counter. I figured I’d probably just spilled something and not noticed. But, then I looked in the slow cooker and the lentils that were cooking were just about dried out. I added more water and didn’t think anything of it. Until it happened again and again and again. To the point that I ended up having to place a thick down down next to the cooker to absorb the drips. On top of it, I ended up using the same amount of water for the slower crockpot as I did for double the recipe size in the larger.

So…after just a week I’m retiring my 3 1/2 quart Rival CrockPot and heading to Bloomingdale’s this weekend to try a higher end version in that size – the All-Clad slow cooker. Of course, I’ll keep you all posted.

Feel free to contribute your own slow cooker stories – I know they’re out there!