The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Chef takes on the slow cooker
Hugh Acheson creates recipes that will have you using your Crock-Pot again.
Both a tad campy and solidly useful, “The Chef and the Slow Cooker” (Clarkson Potter, $29.99) by James Beard Award-winning chef and cookbook author Hugh Acheson, is a surprise in many ways.
Acheson is known around these parts as the driving force behind Athens and Atlanta fine dining restaurants 5&10, The National, and Empire State South.
Plus there are the Spiller Park Coffee shops, and First & Third Hot Dog and Sausage Shack at SunTrust Park, where his newest full-service restaurant, Achie’s, is set to open in the Omni Hotel.
But even with all that going on, Acheson is probably much better known nationally for his wry presence on Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters,” and ongoing starring role as a judge on “Top Chef.”
Of course, that begs the question, Why a slow-cooker book? The answer, revealed in a recent conversation was, more or less, Why not?
“It was actually a matter of my editor Francis Lam pitching it to me,” Acheson said. “He sort of saw the writing on the wall that the slow-cooker was going to be pertinent, again. I’d been using them for years to make chicken stock at home.
“And then there’s the ubiquitous pot roast and stuff like that. It got me thinking about how you could take something that pretty much everybody already has, but they rarely use, and make it a gateway to cooking from scratch, again.”
Acheson’s solution was to bring the slow cooker conversation into the present tense. To that end, he created 100 recipes for dishes that represent his unique point of view as a chef while offering convenient options for home cooks.
“To me, it just meant that you need to do food that is exciting and contemporary with the archaic technology of a slow cooker,” he said. “It’s not an Instant Pot. It’s not a steamer. It’s just a simple slow cooker.
“But you can do pretty much anything in it. It’s easy to use. Easy to clean. It’s there, and you’re not using it. And using a slow cooker on a regular basis is a call to use lesser cuts of meat that are a really good value.”
“The Chef and The Slow Cooker” begins with a primer on stocks and broths, which become the foundation for building many of the other recipes in the book.
“Using a slow cooker for stocks is ideal,” Acheson said. “Because of the even temperature, it produces really clear stocks. Then freezing stocks in wide-mouth jars with a little space for expansion is great.
“You can open up the freezer and have a dark chicken stock or a shrimp stock or a pho broth, and all these things make a larder. Having a larder is really the way that we expand our culinary horizons.”
There are sections on beans,
soups, vegetables, seafood, poultry, beef, pork, lamb and goat, and even recipes for slow cooker jams, butters and chutneys. Beyond that, the variety of cuisines touched on is impressive.
Braised Shiitake Mushrooms with Tofu, Thai Basil and Chilies is vegan-friendly, complex and flavorful, even if Acheson describes it as “a recipe for your virtuous meatless Monday.”
“It’s really, really good, really clean, and it turned out really well,” he said.
“I think it came from a dish I had in a Chinese restaurant in New York that I decided was the perfect combination of healthy and meaty in a vegetable presentation.”
For those more interested in a meaty meat dish, there’s Milk-Braised Pork Shoulder with Fennel, Pecans and Figs.
“The key to that recipe is pork shoulder as opposed to using pork loin,” Acheson said. “The structure of the shoulder is going to keep it beautifully moist during the braising process. So it’s another really, really good one.
“And it’s really easy. The milk breaks down into curds and whey for a stunning dish that makes rustic look beautiful. To me, this is very much a fall dish. It’s a right now dish.”