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Home Slow cooker recipes

40 hearty slow cooker recipes

Pop your ingredients in your slow cooker, and come back to a delicious dinner.
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Slow cooker recipes are an easy go-to for comfort meals when the weather gets cooler. The benefits of using a slow cooker are endless; not only does it add ease and convenience to your cooking, but it allows you to create beautifully tender, fragrant and hearty one-pot meals every time, without fail. Simply pop your ingredients in your slow cooker, and come back to a delicious dinner. Too easy!

The versatile slow cooker really comes into its own in winter. After all, cold weather calls for hearty, warming and flavoursome meals—savoury or sweet! These super-easy, melt-in-the-mouth meals and delicious desserts are something that the whole family can look forward to after a long, chilly day. From soups and shanks to stews and steamed puddings, we’ve tested them all in The Australian Women’s Weekly Test Kitchen. So all you have to do is hit the supermarket, grab your ingredients and sit back and relax as your slow cooker does the rest.

You’ll need these…

If you can’t get enough of slow cooking we have plenty more recipes in our delicious chicken recipes to make in your slow cooker and beautiful beef recipes for your slow cooker collections.

How to adapt your favourite recipes for a slow cooker

When it comes to winter comfort food, you can’t go past a heart slow cooker recipe. These one-pot wonders, perfect with almost any cuts of meat, are guaranteed to turn out fragrant, tender meals every time. Best of all, you can just pop your ingredients in and return in a few hours with all the work done for you.

However, not all of our favourite recipes were designed with the slow cooker in mind. Luckily, most of your favourite casserole, curry and soups can easily be converted for a slow cooker.

Here, we’ll take you through what you need to know for adapting your favourite recipes.

Keep in mind that a recipe that takes 2 hours to simmer or slow-roast will take about 6-8 hours on Low or 3-4 hours on High in the slow cooker.

And, as a general rule, a slow cooker should be at least half-full when cooking casseroles, curries and soups. Place vegetables into the cooker, put meat on top, then add the liquid.

Slow cooker recipes for beef curry make it easy to get a delicious meal when you don't want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.

The best cuts of meat for a slow cooker

Budget-friendly, and light on prep-work, it’s the tougher cuts of meat that tenderise well in a slow cooker. Look for:

BEEF: Topside, oyster, blade, skirt, round, chuck, gravy beef.

VEAL: Osso buco, shanks, shoulder.

LAMB: Neck chops, shoulder, shanks, forequarter.

PORK: Forequarter chops, neck/scotch, 
belly, shoulder.

CHICKEN: Drumsticks, thigh cutlets.

SEAFOOD: Seafood is generally not suitable for a slow cooker. The exception is large octopus, which becomes tender in a cooker.

Looking for more tips on adapting recipes to your slow cooker?

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Women's Weekly Food

Trusted by home cooks for 90 years, The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Test Kitchen and cookbooks hold a singular place in shaping home cooking within the Australian culinary landscape. Today, the AWW Test Kitchen in Sydney is a thriving hub for food content, connected to two bustling photographic studios where a talented team of Australia’s best recipe developers, art directors, editors and photographers create our world class food content. Our recipes are thoroughly tested and tasted and given the Test Kitchen tick of approval, guaranteeing you’ll get great results in your home kitchen.

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