Slow cooker - lid lifting - thermal mass (a/k/a What A Crock !)

Cafe Society
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For a while, I was all about my leviathan cast iron skillet. For the most part, if I couldn’t make it in that skillet, I just wouldn’t make it. It felt like a stovetop betrayal.

My skillet is taking a much needed culinary sabbatical. Last I heard from it, it was in the Costa del Sol, in Spain, luxuriating on Playa de Paella – a well-oiled, bronzed (don’t overthink it) Adonis.

So now I’m on a wee bit of a slow cooker binge.

And I found an article which, laudably, seeks to educate me on the do’s and dont’s of this particular vessel.

But I have a real problem with this don’t:

Keep peeking or stirring. Every time the lid is opened heat escapes and it takes approximately 20-30 minutes for the slow cooker to come back up to the set temperature.

I tend to use the slow cooker to make big meals – enough to have both refrigerated and frozen leftovers. It’s an 8qt slow cooker and it’s nigh unto full (~80% full) every time I cook with it.

I also use what seems to be the right amount of liquid.

This sounds to me like way too much thermal mass to lose so much ground every time I peek, sniff, or stir.

With an empty, or nearly empty, slow cooker crock, I could maybe see this, but even the crock has a non-trivial amount of thermal mass, no ?

I haven’t taken my remote-reading grill thermometer out in the Herculean Struggle Against Ignorance yet, but I’m not above doing that.

Meanwhile, some Reddit folks seem to side with me, FWIW.

What say ye ? Urban legend/archetypal scare tactic meant to paralyze casual home cooks with gustatory anxiety, or … surprising but true ?

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Yeah, seems like BS to me. The crock is a big heavy piece of ceramic, it’s not losing any temp when you open the lid. At most, you’re going to lose the hot air and the surface water might drop just a tiny bit. I could see if you’re cooking something without any liquid you would lose a lot of heat, but that’s not really what a crock pot is for anyway.

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It’s BS. Sure, if you lift the lid just as the thing is getting cooking, that’s gonna remove a fair proportion of heat. But after that thing gets cooking for a while, all the goop in there is where the heat’s at, stew or chili after a long time on low is like some kind of lava cauldron.

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This was about 80% my take - during the first few hours where both the device and the mass of food is getting to temp, it does seem to make a difference, the part where most slow cooker dishes say something like “2 hours on high, then…” Much past that, it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference with most slow cooked dishes. I do have an exception though, although it’s conditional - Slow Cooker Roast Beef (which I recommend) is designed to come out medium, and has a sub-two-hour cooking time, with a dish like that, you could have some variance in final doneness even with a relatively short de-lidding.

But even that’s an exception that falls within my (and bobot’s exception for the initial cooking period, and the linked dish flat out tells you to use a probe thermometer to determine doneness anyway.

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Ooh. Nice. Bookmarked, with my thanks.

I wanted to type something longer but I totally screwed up. I went to quickly grab something out of the freezer and all of my ice cubes instantly melted. I now have a serious mess to clean up on the hardwood floors :wink:

Whether on that roast beef or just something else, I may have to try the remote probe thermometer, just to get a sense of the impact of lid-lifting, both during the early (Mesozoic) Period, and – in the immortal words of Firesign Theatre – in the late Devouring Period (when fish became obnoxious).

Cheers !