Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook

`Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook' by expert bread cookbook author Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann is hands down the very best book on its subject you are likely to find. It is easily twice the size of my former slow cooker favorite, Judith Finlayson's `The 150 best Slow Cooker recipes' and easily more than twice as good, although this former favorite does have some virtues not in the current subject, such as both English and metric units of measure for all ingredients.

This is a cookery subject on which you do not expect to find a serious treatment by a major cookbook author. Like blender recipes and toaster oven recipes and grill pan recipes and pressure cooker recipes, you usually find books which are little more than one step removed from a manufacturer's booklet, published by the likes of Sunset Press or other speciality publisher, not by the Harvard Commons Press. But, like Jean Anderson's book, `Process This' on food processor cookery, this is a first rate addition to any good cookbook library. In fact, not only is it better than Finlayson's book, it is a lot better than Anderson's book on the food processor.

The quality of the book should be no surprise, given the track record of the principle author, Beth Hensperger. While she is not the leading currently active writer of books on bread (that honor would probably go to Peter Reinhart), she is easily one of the top three or four on the subject and has the James Beard awards to prove it. Co-author Kaufmann is less distinguished, but in reading her biographical sketch, it is clear this is a natural book for this pair, as they have already done a volume on rice cookers, and there are probably no two closer electrical cooking gadgets quite so close to one another as the rice cooker and the slow cooker. It probably also explains why there is relatively little in this book which tells one how to use a slow cooker as a rice cooker, since they already did a book on the subject AND, in spite of the strong similarities, there are enough differences to keep one from easily substituting one for the other.

Aside from the rice cooker stand-in role, this book has simply everything I expected it to have. Every single recipe and every single type of recipe you might expect is here. One thing I hoped for and found, in spades, was a group of recipes for stocks and broths. This is something I have found in no other slow cooker book, as obvious as it is to include it.

In spite of the fact that this is an excellent book which I would recommend to anyone wishing to cook with a slow cooker, I must insert the caveat here that while the slow cooker can be a modern version of time honored traditional cooking methods such as the braise, the daub, the tagine, and the Dutch oven techniques, many other recipes in this book are adaptations of techniques which may really be better done by other means. That is, the time saving gained by using the slow cooker may, in some cases, be gained by losing some culinary virtue. The best example I know is with the recipes for barbecued pork ribs. Adapting barbecue to the slow cooker is a natural, as both are low heat long cooking methods. But, you are approximating true barbecue and not producing a real barbecued result, as there is no smoke involved in the cooking. I will give one more plug to Ms. Finlayson's book on her pork rib barbecue recipe which I have done several times and I find it superior to the recipe for the same dish by Hensperger and Kaufmann. So, if you have Finlayson, Hensperger may not be a major advantage. But, if you have no slow cooker book and you want one, Ms. Hensperger and Ms. Kaufmann have given us the best one I have seen.

It is quite possible that the single most valuable section in this book is in the chapter `From the Porridge Pot'. This gives several different recipes for breakfast dishes with oats, granola, and other varieties of porridge. I saw Alton Brown do this on his `Good Eats' show on oats and I really wished I could find someone with some more details on the technique. Well, here it is. Everything you always wanted to know about making hot breakfast meals with oats, millet, wheat, rice, barley and corn set up the night before and ready for you in the morning.

The next best thing are all the general tips on slow cooking, including suggestions on how to adapt conventional braise, stew, and soup recipes to the slow cooker. One warning from this book which I will repeat here is that while the book includes recipes for several seafood dishes, almost all of them involve adding the seafood near the end of the long cooking period, so there are a fair number of recipes which require some mid-course or landing procedure intervention. But, the authors cover this point again and again.

I am happy to see that the authors avoid endorsing any one slow cooker manufacturer, although they do give some tips on evaluating and selecting a slow cooker and the size of slow cooker best suited to various requirements.

If you like to use the slow cooker or think it will fit into your lifestyle or just enjoy having a good book on every different cooking subject, then this is a book for you.

Highly recommended.

Reviewer: B. Marold