For those readers outside North America, Crock-Pot is a leading brand of slow cooker.
Did it look OK? - I find that anything I cook in the slow cooker comes out darker in colour than it would if I’d cooked it in a pan - something about caramelised sugars, I expect.
Looked fine to me. Nothing incredibly unusual or anything.
Quite a good guess I reckon. Corned beef and cabbage isn’t eaten a lot over here. Bacon and cabbage is however. The Irish who went to the States just used what was there.
That’s just about how I was taught to make it including discarding the vegetables used to make the stock and replacing them with freshly cooked ones. I was taught to do this with all varieties of slow cooked things where the initial purpose of the vegetable is to give up their flavour to the stock. They are pretty soggy and tasteless by then. I use chats (small potatoes) rather than cutting up big ones and use one or two in the first stage to thicken the gravy and add 2 freshly boiled ones per serve at the end.
Doing it in the crockpot I start with all the vegetables on the bottom and put the meat on top. I start with enough fluid to cover the veges and half the meat. After a while I check it. Usually enough juices are rendered from the meat to have everything covered. If not stir the meat layer over, add a bit more liquid and leave it for a while. Keep checking it and incrementally adding fluid to taste. I like thick, unctuous sauces so I tend to keep fluids to a minimum.
Most slow cooker/crockpot recipes try to make out that once you have started cooking you should never lift the lid unless it is to reduce the fluids at the end. This is absolute nonsense - yes you will lengthen the cooking time, but hey we are slow cooking so who cares. I find that many crockpot recipes are greatly improved by the gradual addition of fluids rather than hoping that the prescribed amount will work out for my particular cut of meat, out of season/different choice of vegetables.
I don’t know what inspired me to crap on like this but one last thing - it is really cool to use parsnips instead of carrots in the stock but then add carrots (dutch preferably) at serving time. In any recipe that uses carrots. Just go to a greengrocer and snap the tip off a parsnip and a carrot and smell them one at a time.
How would the temperature of a peat fire translate to a gas or electric stovetop setting – warm, low, medium, high?
I imagine it would be low.