Slow cookers are easy to use and a great way to make a delicious meal. But that is not the end of the benefits they bring along. When using this cooking style, you don’t have to worry about timing yourself. But is slow cooking healthy, too?
So, what you are looking at can be labelled ‘hands-off style’ cooking. Slow cooking is, without a doubt, an extremely efficient and convenient way to prepare a tasty meal.
But make no mistake, you can use this even if you are short on time. In fact, it was made for those who don’t have the time for an elaborate meal.
That’s right. Here’s how that plays out.
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All About Slow Cooking: What Makes It Healthy?
The beauty is in the simple fact that you need to put all the ingredients into the slow cooker and let it work its magic while you are gone. But this style of cooking was actually, conventionally speaking, the way fast food was made.
Now, the reference to fast food brings up another question that many people who do and don’t use this technique often ask—why is it healthy? Here’s all you need to know on that front.
#1 Low Temperature
Slow cooking cannot happen in high temperatures because it takes about 4 to 5 hours. For that, the temperature is brought down, which keeps the nutrients in the food more stable when compared to any other type of cooking.
#2 No Loss Of Nutrients
Apart from being stable, the nutrients are all in a sealed container. Whether you use a casserole dish and cook it in the oven or an electric slow cooker, you will not lose the ingredients to the liquid or the heat because they are eventually absorbed into your meal.
And since they are cooked longer, you will also notice that the resultant food has more flavour. This means you don’t have to use extra sauces or seasoning to make it a good dish. The food uses spices and herbs to make it taste the way it should.
This is also a useful way of cooking root vegetables because they get soft, which makes it easier to consume and digest them if that’s a factor.
#3 Uses Natural Ingredients
This is not a heat-intensive cooking style like roasting and frying, where many additives are added for flavouring. In this type of cooking, you are more inclined to use natural ingredients like ground spices and vegetables, which are better for your health.
So, consuming many, if not most, meals from your crockpot might be good for your health because you will reduce the interference in added ingredients that are not the healthiest choice.
Cooking in the crockpot limits the ingredients to what you can cook, which means you are less likely to develop problems from a bad diet. That is also because some of the ingredients added later when roasting or frying food might already be contaminated with the many different types of bacteria in their vicinity. All of that can be totally avoided with slow cooking.
And meat-eaters can also rejoice because slow cooking does a good job with tough meats. It makes it tender thanks to the extra moisture and the extended cooking time, but it also means you don’t need to add fat content that makes the dish climb the calorie chart.
#4 No More AGEs
If you haven’t heard of them, AGEs or advanced glycation end products are items with toxins that often get consumed with animal products, especially meats, of many different kinds.
Whether broiling, frying, or grilling them, the high temperature does not kill the toxins. AGEs are popular for adding flavour to the food, but they are also linked to kidney diseases, diabetes, inflammation and more.
This can be easily avoided by using a slow cooker, which keeps the temperature low and maintains the water content, which helps keep those toxins at bay.
Is Slow Cooking Healthy? Summing Up
Many people who haven’t tried using a slow cooker think they need a lot of time to get into this, but it is actually the conventional model for fast food.
Despite the opposite direction in which the name went, slow cooking was actually meant to be a way of facilitating fast food because it doesn’t need a lot of preparation.
And, if you do it at night, you will have a full meal ready for the next day. And doesn’t that sound just wonderful?
