CLEVER COOKS

We’ve made slow cooker dinners even more ingenious with smart hacks and only 5 main ingredients!

With just five ingredients, plus basic staples, we’ve created recipes that show how less can often be so much more. Bringing a slow cooker into the equation creates the perfect scenario for saving time, while building the biggest flavours.

And if slow cooking with just very few ingredients sounds like an impossible idea, it’s not. We went back to the drawing board in our Test Kitchen to develop recipes using no more than five ingredients, working hard to make them not just convenient for you but delicious too. Certainly, you need to provide a few basics, but these are standard pantry items and are the types of things you’re unlikely to run out of. Butter, oils, vinegars and salt and pepper – we’ve kept it to these simple items. At their heart, these recipes are structured around quality ingredients and fresh, seasonal produce, with nothing included that’s esoteric or hard to source. To keep ingredient lists strictly to five, we began the development of each dish by choosing a single hero ingredient, then allowed ourselves no more than four supporting ones. We gave great thought to what those remaining ingredients should be; when forced to cook using fewer elements, we found we really questioned the value of each one. Was it absolutely right? Was there a better one to use? Did it really bring maximum flavour and goodness to the table? Anything that didn’t satisfy our strict criteria, and result in the best possible outcomes, did not make the grade. We realised too that clever use of convenience ingredients, all available from the supermarket, can be a good way to go with this easy style of cooking. Not every product that’s ‘convenience’ necessarily means a compromise; sometimes, when you’re busy, it’s smart to take a shortcut or two. Creamed canned corn, canned tomatoes, beans and chickpeas, frozen vegetables, tomato passata, caramelised onions, chutneys, curry pastes, marinades, peanut butter and bottled fruit – these types of pantry items can be kitchen lifesavers. Used well, they enhance a dish, as well as saving buckets of your precious time. While all these recipes are designed for everyday dining, there are plenty to suit casual entertaining too. With the spectacular results you’ll achieve, you’ll find it hard to believe how pared back these dishes really are. We give Make It Six suggestions, giving you the option of adding a single additional ingredient to embellish and take things up a notch. If you’ve forgotten an ingredient or there’s something listed that you don’t really like, our Swap It tips are a useful guide to suitable substitutes. Finally, a note on slow cookers. The technology around these has really advanced since the early days of the original Crock Pot. Newer multi-cookers perform various functions, allowing you to, among other things, sear meat and brown vegetables. Some have heatproof inners that you can put directly on the stovetop to start cooking, then transfer to the slow cooker to complete the dish. While these are versatile functions, they’re not vital to have for these recipes.