Top Tips for Making Better Slow-Cooker Chicken, Stews, Sauces, and More

Here are some tips that will help you master the art of using a slow cooker. 

Browning food adds flavor, and you can do it either at the beginning or at the end of a slow-cooker recipe. 

How to Do It: Brown meat for a stew in a skillet on the stovetop before adding it to the slow cooker with the broth and vegetables. Or run slow-cooked chicken parts under the broiler to brown them—and add flavor and texture—before serving. 

Slow cooking can mute flavors, so we like to use lots of potent ingredients to build big flavor in slow-cooked dishes. 

How to Do It: Add strong ingredients such as garlic, lemon or lime juice, vinegar, soy or Worcestershire sauce, anchovies, tomato paste, dried mushrooms, and bold spices to slow-cooker recipes. And don’t forget the salt!

The covered environment of a slow cooker means that there is little evaporation, so sauces don’t naturally concentrate and reduce. 

How to Do It: To thicken the sauces of slow-cooked dishes, we often use a roux (a paste of fat and flour), pureed beans or vegetables that are already in the dish, or instant tapioca. 

The best slow cookers (such as our testing winner, the KitchenAid 6-Quart Slow Cooker with Solid Glass Lid) reach a maximum cooking temperature of about 200 degrees. When set to high, these machines get up to 200 degrees faster; when set to low, they get there more slowly. Models that didn’t perform well in our testing often cooked food around the boiling point of 212 degrees, which was too hot for optimal results. 

How to Do It: Slow cookers set to low cook food more gently because they take longer to come up to the maximum temperature. 

Using a slow cooker isn’t an exact science. Discrepancies in heating power can create dramatically different results in different machines. Some models run hot and fast, while others reach their maximum temperatures more slowly. The tightness of the lid seal can also affect how efficiently a cooker heats. 

How to Do It: Always pay attention to the time ranges given in recipes: Are dishes cooked in your machine typically finished at the lower or higher ends of the time ranges given? The answer tells you if you have a relatively “fast” or “slow” model and allows you to compensate accordingly. 

We found that the only way to cook chicken (and turkey) in a slow cooker is on the low setting and for a relatively short amount of time.

We recommend that until you have experience cooking chicken in your slow cooker, start checking the temperature of chicken breasts (boneless and bone-in), whole chicken, and turkey breasts at the low end of the temperature range to ward off dry, overcooked poultry. Chicken thighs, on the other hand, are more forgiving, making them especially well suited to the slow cooker because their dark meat becomes meltingly tender during the long cooking time; for this reason, we cook them longer than bone-in or boneless breasts, and we don’t check their temperature. Longer cooking times are also needed in soups or casseroles where the meat is insulated by other ingredients.

One other helpful tip when it comes to cooking a whole chicken in a slow cooker: Place it breast side down. Our testers discovered that placing the chicken breast side down yields a moister bird because the juices from the dark meat render down into the breast, keeping it from becoming overcooked as the dark meat reaches the proper temperature.