Do you know what I mean? My wife makes a lot of soups & stuff in our crock pot since it’s so convenient to put the ingredients in, go to work and let it slowly cook all day. She made some crock pot soup for dinner last night and I just had some leftovers for lunch.
But, although I like crock pot food well enough, I’ve noticed for a long time that there is a certain flavor imparted to just about anything that is cooked in a crock pot. I can’t think of anything to compare it to, so it’s hard to describe, but to me it’s distinctive enough that if you made two batches of soup from exactly the same ingredients, but made one batch in a crock pot and one slowly simmered on the stove, and blind taste-tested me, I think I’d easily know which was the crock pot batch. What causes that “crock pot flavor”, if anyone else knows what I mean? The “pot” part is ceramic and the top is glass, so I would think it’s entirely non-reactive. All I can think of is cooking at very low temperatures at long periods of time cause a certain chemical reaction that causes the certain flavor. Or am I crazy?
This is so “MPSIMS”, I know, but since it involves food, I’m putting it here.
Perhaps the difference you are noticing is not so much “crockpot flavor” but “stovetop pot flavor”? I assume you’re using some sort of metal pot in the simmered soup.
As for fast vs. slow, some things do taste different when cooked “low and slow.” Have you tried cooking something in a crockpot, but set it to high and cook it for fewer hours, then tasting it?
The only thing I can think of is that crock pots don’t get high enough to brown things. Even when people are cooking food slowly in an oven or on the stove, they’re still using a high-enough temperature to get some browning most of the time. The chemical reactions that result from that do affect flavor. My solution with most of my crock pot cooking is to sear meats in a pan before I put it in the crock pot.
If don’t know if that (lack of) flavor is what you’re describing. If you mean something else, then it’s not something I’ve observed in any of the crock pots I’ve owned.
Telemark, no, newish crock pot, clean, in great shape.
For some reason it didn’t occur to me to try googling “crock pot flavor” until after I posted, and it looks like I’m not alone in noticing this, although it’s often described as a metallic taste, and I don’t know if I’d describe it that way. Someone mentioned in the reddit post that it could be from adding onions raw, not browning or at least sweating them first. I think they may be on to something there. My wife does add raw onions typically, and I think the low temp doesn’t do enough to mellow out their harsh raw flavor:
Yeah, it’s not just meat where the temperature of your cooking can make a difference. I generally give vegetables a quick sear in a pan too.
In fact, thinking about onions specifically… I once did french onion soup entirely in a crock pot starting from raw onions. It was good enough, but not quite the same as my usual technique (in cast iron on a stove top at the lowest burner setting). I assumed I just hadn’t cooked the onions long enough, but it might be that I didn’t cook them hot enough.
Interesting. I seem to remember noticing an odd flavour to any of the stews my mother used to cook in her old pressure cooker (I’m talking a 1930s model used until well into the 1960s). I think it might have been the same sort of phenomenon. It didn’t happen when she used it to stew down fruit - but then fruit doesn’t need searing.
I can’t say I’ve ever noticed anything specific to crock-pots, but long, slow cooking tends to cook out a lot of the more volatile aromatic compounds out of the foods and seasoning ingredients. So something with basil, for example, will lose a lot of that flavor as it literally goes into the air. Same thing with acidic ingredients.
So you can often perk up crock-pot dishes with a shot of herbs/spices at the end of cooking along with something acidic like lemon juice, vinegar, etc… for a little more brightness.
