Hello. We’re The Smart Slow Cooker, a place for home cooks who are looking for quality slow cooking resources. Alongside recipes, you’ll find in-depth guides, opinions, and articles exploring our latest curiosities.
We are US-based, so our recipes tend to use ingredients that are easy to source in North America. We are 100% independent—no sponsored content, no influence—we are entirely reader-supported. You’ll find a chronicle of our slow cooking adventures over on Reddit where we’ve participated in a popular cooking challenge for years.
Happy cooking!
We’re doing something different
What’s different? First and foremost, we offer sensible slow cooking resources and recipes in a simple, clean format. In an increasingly cluttered world, we aim to be a place of calm with recipes without fluff.
You won’t find repetitive information—just simple classic dishes you will want to make over and over again. For example, there’s only one recipe for Sloppy Joes over on the blog. Why? Because nobody actually wants a “creamy” version or a “cheeseburger” interpretation.
When it’s time to get family dinner on the table, you don’t need to know how to make yogurt, moonshine, or even brownies.
And we aren’t here to convince you that you need a separate slow cooking appliance—chances are, you don’t. We’ll be the first to tell you that your oven, stove, or grill will give you better results than a countertop appliance, but sometimes a slow cooker is the answer. And when life calls for a slow cooker, recipes should be reliable and good.
To successfully slow cook, you don’t need 1000’s of recipes, you just need the classics and your family’s favorites.
The BackStory
A countertop cooker—of any sort—was not a sought-after addition to our kitchen. But a slow cooker turned out to be the most useful appliance when facing a dinner time scheduling challenge. Our dinner options:
Cooking ahead and reheating food wasn’t a good fit because our group wasn’t keen on anything perceived as leftovers. And time spent reheating food would only delay bedtime.
Someone suggested using a dutch oven in a low temp oven. A slow oven makes sense in many situations, but we weren’t comfortable leaving an old oven in an old house unattended for 7+ hours.
Someone else suggested a pressure cooker for quick cooking, but this would have taken too much time when we got home. We needed instant dinner, not an Instant Pot.
So despite believing countertop slow cookers were trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist, we had to admit the best solution for cooking at home on those particular days was indeed a slow cooker.
The Slow Cooker Challenge
After purchasing a slow cooker, it was surprisingly difficult to find a variety of recipes that met our specific need: meals that could cook for 8 hours and result in great flavor and were ready to serve when we walked in the door, without additional steps or prep.
Longer-cooking dishes with flavor and texture were the goal. After a while we collected a variety of recipes best suited to longer cooking times.
Doing things different
Again, what we assumed would be an easy task—finding a variety of good long-cooking recipes—proved to be unusually difficult.
Sites that offered tested slow cooker recipes, like America’s Test Kitchen, were only available as a subscription. Our go-to resource, NYT Cooking, offered very few slow cooker recipes at the time.
Most food blogging sites were a mess with annoying ads and repetitive recipes. Who has the time to sort through 18 versions of pulled pork or 23 takes on chili? And most slow cooker recipes treat the device as a dump-and-run experiment.
And cookbooks were loaded down with filler recipes—things like “how to make yogurt in the slow cooker.” But we needed dinner.
So, we decided to do something different.
Our Approach
Our approach is simple, but effective: start with the best cooking resources, adapt top recipes for slow cooker use, and provide additional ideas for how to make the recipes your own. The internet does not need yet another video on how to steam artichokes or how to make roux, so we link to and include the expert resources that are the most authentic and helpful.
You’ll find more information and recipes over on the cooking blog. And our collection of all-day slow cooker recipes are available in an online cookbook format.
Just recipes. No filler. No fluff. No subscription. If the cost of the all-day collection is prohibitive for your family, just reach out here. Bon appétit!