Slow Cooking Efficiently at Christmas
Slow cooking is a real favourite during the colder months. It’s the perfect way to prepare rich, hearty meals that the whole family can enjoy.
What’s more, slow cooking isn’t just a simple and easy way to create delicious healthy meals, it could also serve up savings on your energy bills – something we’re all looking to devour at the moment!
What is slow cooking?
Simply put, slow cooking is when you cook at a much lower temperature than usual, but over a significantly longer period of time. This can be done using an oven at a low temperature, or a purpose made slow-cooker that sits on your work surface and plugs into the mains.
Meals that are cooked slowly are often incredibly tasty, with the connective tissues and fibres in meats and vegetables breaking down, giving rich, full-bodied flavours to recipes like stews, soups and sauces.
How does a slow cooker save energy?
Due to the current cost of living crisis, we’re all looking for energy-saving hacks that can help mitigate those scary increases on our gas and electricity bills. Making lots of small changes in the way we do things at home can add up to decent savings over the course of a year.
Even though a slow cooker takes longer to cook a meal than an oven operating at full heat, they have relatively lower power use. While an oven running at moderate heat is typically rated as high as 2-3 kilowatts per hour, most slow cookers are rated much lower, around the 0.7 kWh mark.
“Watts” more, they rely on trapped heat to cook the food once they’ve warmed up. This means they aren’t running fully all the time, and will use very little energy to maintain the temperature they’re set to.
In fact, although it depends on the size of the slow cooker and how long it’s on for, slow cookers are generally said to use less electricity than a traditional light bulb.
Should I use my oven or a dedicated slow cooker?
While both slow cooking with an oven and a dedicated slow cooker are typically cheaper and more energy efficient than conventional cooking, there are some additional factors to consider.
If you have a gas oven, high gas prices could mean that you’d end up spending more money than if you were using a counter-top electric slow cooker instead. And electric ovens are usually the most expensive item in the kitchen.
To give a rough estimate, research by Utilita found that a slow cooker costs on average around 16p per day to run, compared to 87p per day for a 2kWh electric oven.
But if you have a recipe that can be completed in just 10-15 minutes on a high setting in your oven – or even a few minutes in the microwave – it’s unlikely that a slow cooker will do the job better, as it may take many hours on a lower heat to achieve a similar result.
There is also the added convenience of a slow cooker to consider, as you can just put all the ingredients in in the morning, go about your day as normal, and come back to a lovely home-cooked dinner that’s ready to serve.
Why choose a slow cooker instead of an air fryer?
While air fryers have become increasingly popular over recent years, and are great at what they do, it really depends on what you want to cook. For recipes that have lots of ingredients that need to be blended as they cook, air fryers just aren’t up to the task. Slow cookers are also much easier to use than air fryers – you simply throw the ingredients in, add a little bit of water and you’re ready to go, without any worry of overcooking or burning your food. Leaving food for longer in a slow cooker will just make it more tender, with little risk of it ruining.
In Conclusion
If you haven’t started slow cooking already, what are you waiting for? Not only can you make meals with minimal preparation, but you can also save money on your energy bills, something we’re all trying to do this year. Explore our range of cookers and find the perfect choice for your kitchen.
And the best part? You can buy your slow cooker now in time for Christmas, but pay for it later, in smaller instalments, using our ‘plug in now, pay later’ finance options. We know there’s usually enough weighing on the bank balance at this time of year!
