Western Morning News (Saturday)
Let’s hear it for the poor man’s AGA – the brilliant slow cooker
Food writer Martin Hesp has some ideas for warming up our winter mealtimes, as the temperature outside drops
As the weather turns the Westcountry a paler shade of winter white and temperatures remain low, so something seems to occur deep inside the human psyche – or, to be more exact, deep inside the human digestive system.
Seasonality has an important role to play in our lives, particularly when it comes to the food we eat. When spring arrives, most of us rediscover a desire to eat salads and light, freshly-prepared dishes, but at this time of year the opposite applies. If even a suggestion of snow blankets the ground we find ourselves yearning for warming soups and stews. The word casserole lingers across the tongue like a well-cooked piece of beef shin. Comfort food is king.
The common factor among many of the flavoursome concoctions we hanker for is that they must be cooked long and slow in order to bring the best out in them. Most winter stew recipes do better using the cheap cuts of meat which are only willing to give up their deep and velvety flavours if you are willing to coax them gently for long enough. These cuts tend to come from muscle bound areas that have worked hard for a living and are consequently tough.
Oxtail stew is a wondrously rich example of the genre, so too is the Italian dish osso buco which, in that country, is made with veal shin but which I concoct with best
Westcountry grass-fed beef. What happens in these recipes is that unmentionable items such as fats, connective tissues and marrowbone jellies are slowly drawn out, turning the cooking juices into an unctuous and silken liquid that is uniquely rich both in texture and in flavour.
Of course, the very best way of making these slow-cooked delights is to put most of the ingredients into a heavy, lidded, pot and stow the whole thing away in the bottom oven of an AGA or Rayburn, or some such burner, for as many hours as you dare.
People lucky enough to own such appliances swear by them, not only because they create a kind of heart and soul in the kitchen, but because they are capable of producing heart warming soul food that is either beyond the means of your average electric or gas oven, or is going to cost you a small fortune when the utility bill arrives.
In days when I could afford such luxuries, I was hopelessly addicted to my AGA, but the bitter time came when Hesp had to wander AGA-less into a winter world and since that grim moment slow-prepared stews have been the stuff of memory.
Or they had, until I read a snippet in a newspaper cookery column which both named and shamed the five most useless kitchen gadgets on the market, and at the same time lauded the five best. Top of her useful items was an appliance known as a slow cooker.
The food writer declared: “Simply throw the raw ingredients in before dashing off to work in the morning and you will have an amazing meal ready for when you come home. If there was just one gadget I could take to my desert island it would be my slow cooker.”
Slow cookers have suffered the occasional bout of bad press down the years thanks to tales of food poisoning, allegedly caused by the fact the contents are cooked so slowly they never reach temperatures necessary to kill nasty bacteria.
If there was any truth in these tales of woe, the problems have been countered by the latest machines. Many are designed with a “hold” feature - designed, according to the manufacturers, to keep food at the perfect safe temperature without overcooking.
And slow-cookers are ridiculously cheap nowadays - you can buy a good model for under 30 quid and you will probably save that in electricity bills after a single winter because, used judiciously, they don’t burn much more than a light bulb. If ever there was a poor-man’s AGA, then the humble slow-cooker is it.
However, I have graduated from basic slow-cookers to “programmable pressure cookers”, which have a slow-cook option alongside countless other uses and benefits. You can purchase a top model from Instant Pot for around £100.
Both slow and pressure cooking offer great ways to preserve the nutrients and flavour of basic ingredients. I also like the versatility. Not only do they handle the soups and stews I’ve been talking about with great aplomb, but they are also ideal for creating homemade stocks and sauces. The handbooks will also give interesting recipes for lightly cooked vegetables and various sweets and puddings.
We used ours to very slowly and gently cook a ham the other day, before putting a quick glaze over it with the 15-minute help of the fan oven. Cooked low, slow and gently you get a much better result with a ham – more dense and less stringy – an altogether superior “mouthfeel” as the professionals say.
But it was a conversation I had with a top Westcountry chef many years ago that got me thinking about another slow-cooked pork dish. I’d just enjoyed 16-hour
cooked belly of pork in a Devon restaurant and it was a recipe I very much wanted to try at home, so the head chef kindly gave me the recipe.
The thought of running my electric fan-oven for a full 16-hours rang environmentally disastrous alarm bells with me, so I adapted the recipe for a slow-cooker. You simply set up a kind of bain-marie inside the crock-pot, placing a whole slab of belly pork in a trivet suspended above a pint of good Westcountry cider infused with herbs and garlic. After eight hours I removed the skin from the belly pork and later blasted it in the oven to create the most amazing crackling. The rest of the recipe adheres more or less to the one I was given.