How awesome is slow cooking?

[conwy]

This week I decided to give slow cooking a try.

Not owning a slow cooker and not wanting to make a rash purchase, I decided to do a small experiment with my regular steel pot. I cooked my usual evening meal (vegetarian), but instead of cooking it through, I just kept it on the stove for 5 minutes (induction, high setting). I then removed it from the stove, taped over the steam vent, and immediately wrapped it in 2 tea towels, and placed it in a small zippable cooler bag which I zipped tight. I then went out to run a few errands and returned 3 hours later.

After retrieving the pot from the bag, the meal was perfectly cooked and ready to eat!

How did I live 30-something years old and never try this? Slow cooking is awesome!

To begin to list some of the pro's:

• Less time spent cooking - just 5 minutes chopping the vegetables, 5 minutes cooking, then place in the towels and bag - done!
• Convenient when kitchen time is at a premium - e.g. at when travelling and staying in shared accommodation, busy hostel kitchens, etc.
• No burning - when "fast cooking" I often accidentally burned food because I got distracted doing other stuff while waiting for it to cook.
• Easier cleanup - with the right amount of water added during the stove heating up period, the food doesn't stick to the base at all and easily washes off. No more awful scrubbing with steel wool as I used to have to do.
• Less energy required - potential cost savings!
• Portable solution - just a small steel pot, 2 tea towels and a cooler bag. Easily fits in a backpack. Great for a travel / minimalist lifestyle.
• Less steam - meaning less chance for mould to grow, less strong food smell throughout the home, etc.
• Good for off-grid lifestyle - imagine how little gas/electricity you need when you only need to use the stove 5 minutes per day

When did it become the norm in the developed world to cook in such energy intensive ways? I mean, there's nothing wrong with an occasional stir fry, sauté or baked meal for a treat. But every day seems excessive. Maybe the corporate wage-slave "pressure cooker" lifestyle encourages people to eat their meal shortly after making it? But there must be a better way, and I think I've found it!

Credit to Jacob – slow cooking is mentioned in Early Retirement Extreme under Health.

[conwy]

Update - so slow cooking turned into not-so-slow cooking.

Turns out 3 hours had been excessive and 20 minutes was sufficient.

So now my routine is:
1. Cook on high for 5 minutes
2. Place in thermal bag for 20 minutes
3. Done

I noticed Jacob's recommendations about a pressure cooker; I might look into getting one. However what I like about the regular pot + thermal bag combo is how portable it is. I can easily pack them into a backpack and make meals anywhere I stay. So it's very suitable for a nomadic / travelling lifestyle. But that said, I will likely look to invest in a pressure cooker sometime in future, especially given it could allow me to save on costs by purchasing dry foods instead of canned (lentils, beans, etc.)

[Jean]

your post made me realise i forgot my vacuum bottle i use for cooking while hiking.
i boil the water once, pour it in the botlle to pre heat it, close the bottle, cook the meal until hot, pour it in the bottle, close the bottle, wait about 25 minutes for rice, eat.
It saves a lot of gaz, it's cost efficient in about 3 weeks of camping, weighth efficient in about 1 week.

[Gewie]

I tried something similar recently for making yogurt overnight. I heated milk to 82C, let it cool to 49C, added some active culture yogurt from the store, and wrapped the pot in a bunch of blankets inside of a box overnight. It made some good yogurt, and the pot was still quite warm the next morning! I think I'll try doing something similar with beans and stews next time I get a chance.

[jacob]

When did it become the norm in the developed world to cook in such energy intensive ways? I mean, there's nothing wrong with an occasional stir fry, sauté or baked meal for a treat. But every day seems excessive. Maybe the corporate wage-slave "pressure cooker" lifestyle encourages people to eat their meal shortly after making it? But there must be a better way, and I think I've found it!

I doubt there's any kind of conspiracy behind it. More likely, modern cooking evolved around what kind of stoves people had access to/generally used. Stir fry works over open fire, so likely lower latitudes. Boiling stuff works on a heath or a stove with a lot of mass to heat the rest of the house, so likely northern latitudes. Since food culture is very slow in evolving but cooking methods aren't people just kept the food preferences of their grandparents while developing the technological kitchen appliances to make it happen with little concern for energy efficiency because energy was and still is rather cheap.

[Ego]

Yes, perpetual stews were the norm in many places since medieval times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew

Might be a good feature of a multi-day ere meetup. Seems to be getting quite popular today.

[Dave]

Might be a good feature of a multi-day ere meetup. Seems to be getting quite popular today.

Love this!

I'm hopeful now that @jacob gets his perpetual lentil soup up and going for the next time we do a Tour de Cicero . Would be a quintessential ERE experience to eat DLJ's lentil soup out of reused plastic counters we picked up while walking and spreading books on systems theory, permaculture, spiral dynamics, and economics across Cicero's outdoor library boxes in an effort to plant educational seeds for an ERE City/Village.

As part of our skillshare post-meal, I would be happy to give and teach the mohawk haircut to anyone who grows their hair out a bit .

[guitarplayer]

Yes, perpetual stews were the norm in many places since medieval times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew

This is great and so obvious - once you know it. If I ever have kids or more people than DW and I living with us I am going to implement this. For two people, one slow cooker (the size like on the Wikipedia page) would produce too much food if ran perpetually.

[ducknald_don]

Presumably you would need to keep it at a minimum temperature to avoid bacteria building up.

[guitarplayer]

Yes I think so. I normally use setting ‘high’ which is around the water boiling point judging by the bubbles I get after some 3.5h - might depend on a particular slow cooker model.

[jacob]

Presumably you would need to keep it at a minimum temperature to avoid bacteria building up.

60-70C is about all that's needed to do that. Bacteria don't thrive in that heat. Same reason why water heaters are set to that temperature.

[ebast]

I doubt there's any kind of conspiracy behind it. More likely, modern cooking evolved around what kind of stoves people had access to/generally used. Stir fry works over open fire, so likely lower latitudes.

sounds legit.. or maybe.... what county of England your ancestor/indentured ancestor's master/neighbors came from?

The most detailed inquiry finds three distant culinary regimes of food preparation, marked by a special taste for frying in the south and west, for boiling in the north, and for baking in East Anglia. All methods of cooking, of course, exist in every region. But the balance is distinctly different from one part of England to another—so much so that even in the twentieth century British merchants vary their inventories of kitchen equipment according to region.

Unfortunately early British colonists did not stay in their lane/latitude:

• New England Puritans: Baking. "An important staple of this diet was “pease porridge,” which gradually developed into what Lucy Larcom called “the canonical dish of our Forefathers”: New England baked beans."
• Virginia: Frying, meat of course, fricasee. oh, and "Colonists of humble rank commonly ate a one-dish meal, which was called a “mess” in the old English sense of a “dish of food." It often consisted of greens and salt meat, seasoned with wild herbs."
• Northern Mid-Atlantic (Quakers): Boiling and.. (Wait, we were always nuts about food?): "Quakers also refused to touch foods that were tainted by social evil. Some did not use sugar because it had been grown by slave labor. Others banned salt from their tables, because it bore taxes which paid for military campaigns. Benjamin Lay, a Quaker eccentric who lived in a cave, refused to drink tea or wear animal skins or even to use wool. Joshua Evans refused to eat the flesh of any creature, and drank only broth and gravy. Few Quakers were as radical as Lay and Evans, but many practiced some small act of symbolic sacrifice. Anne Mifflin, for example, gave up butter because she believed that it was “corrupting” to the spirit."
• Appalachia: Fermenting? "One important staple of this diet was clabber, a dish of sour milk, curds and whey which was eaten by youngsters and adults throughout the backcountry, as it had been in North Britain for many centuries. In southern England it was called “spoiled milk” and fed to animals; in the borderlands it was “bonny clabber” and served to people. Travelers found this dish so repellent that some preferred to go hungry." Ok, more palatably, what you might expect: potatoes, "corn" (was oats, now maize), but "Many visitors remarked that backsettlers ate food which other English-speaking people fed to their animals." (c.f. lexicographer Samuel Johnson's entry on "oats")

The more things change...

But to address the conspiracy question, many of the common techniques employed by early colonists are pretty energy intensive, involving what you could probably call "boiling the hell out of", roasting all day or even dehydrating over (wood) fire... on the other hand, those are some drafty poorly-insulated wooden homes if you've ever lived in one and chopping firewood heats you twice.. Web of goals, web of goals.

various "food ways" from a wonderful history book: https://erenow.org/common/fourbritishfo ... erica1989/

[conwy]

your post made me realise i forgot my vacuum bottle i use for cooking while hiking.
i boil the water once, pour it in the botlle to pre heat it, close the bottle, cook the meal until hot, pour it in the bottle, close the bottle, wait about 25 minutes for rice, eat.
It saves a lot of gaz, it's cost efficient in about 3 weeks of camping, weighth efficient in about 1 week.

I like the energy + cost + weight efficiency!

When you mention rice - are you saying you are able to use the boiling water to cook the rice by steaming without continuous energy? If so that sounds like a good energy saving technique and something I should try.

[conwy]

I doubt there's any kind of conspiracy behind it. More likely, modern cooking evolved around what kind of stoves people had access to/generally used. Stir fry works over open fire, so likely lower latitudes.
Boiling stuff works on a heath or a stove with a lot of mass to heat the rest of the house, so likely northern latitudes. Since food culture is very slow in evolving but cooking methods aren't people just kept the food preferences of their grandparents while developing the technological kitchen appliances to make it happen with little concern for energy efficiency because energy was and still is rather cheap.

Makes sense how you explain it, looking at it evolutionarily / historically.

In Australia there's a lot of Asian influence. Stir fry is pretty good I guess if you have a gas stove; it's pretty quick to whip something up with a wok. But I guess I'm trying for something that can work in hostel and hotel situations and with minimal noise and steam.

[jacob]

Unfortunately early British colonists did not stay in their lane/latitude:

Me neither. I say good riddance to soups and stews! I fucking hate soup or any stew I can't eat with a fork! One of the wonderful things about globalism is how cooking cultures intermixed and created new dishes(*). I'm surprised and yet not surprised that finer cooking or rather finer cooks follow the same old pattern [of any serious profession] of traveling to different cultures in order to match foreign technique with local preferences of local technique with foreign preferences. The most interesting cooking happens in the edge spaces.

(*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86bleskiver is basically pancakes made in a special pan from Thailand, where the technique or recipe is called Kanom Krok, that Danish colonialists/traders discovered and brought back. Without this connection, there would be no aebleskiver.

Fun fact: When I first got started on my ERE journey almost 25 years ago and learning basic WL3-4 stuff from places like "Tightwad Gazette" and "Dollar Stretcher" people kept mentioning how awesome slowcookers were. Only having access to the web1.0 internet anno 2001, I never could figure out what a slowcooker was. It wasn't until 2004 when I met DW that she pointed one out in Target. We instantly bought it and have been using it ever since.

[guitarplayer]

@Jean @conwy this is another clever way that is obvious once you see it.

I made this remark to DW the other day that when we made Jamaica flower (hibiscus) tea in a thermos (r) for a hike, the flowers were super soft at the end of the day (when normally they are chewy). Obviously, you can do the same with lentils or rice. This is excellent, I cannot wait to try it out.

[Jean]

i havent tried it with lentils, i'de look up the cinetic or try it at home first.
my gf parents made a stirofoam cube with a hole in shape of their pot. They just but the pot in the box when the pot is hot.

[guitarplayer]

Yes try at home first for sure.

My granny used to wrap a pot with rice in half a dozen bedsheets for the same. Was nice to sit on top of it.

But the novel bit for me is that maybe it is possible to just cook rice or lentil (probably the red split lentils) with boiling water from the kettle and thermos alone. Which I am not sure if this is what you had in mind, but this is exactly what I am going to try out and see how it works. Maybe heat up dry rice / lentils in a microwave for a minute first.

I am going to go and try now.

[Jean]

yes, just kettle and thermos. I'm quite sure red lentils would work. I tried with rice and pasta.

[guitarplayer]

I call my experiment 80% success at first pass. The lentils from the top part of the thermos were mushy as usual, the ones at the bottom where still whole but soft, slightly al dente. I should say, I had no red split lentils, only whole (though hulled).

I did 400g red lentils and 1200g boiling water, with the lentils at room temperature which lowered the temperature in the thermos

1200*100/1600 + 400*15/1600 ~= 79 [Celsius]

I am almost sure if I do the same but stick dry lentils / rice etc in my microwave for a minute or two, it will work perfectly.

Thanks @Jean.