Frying ingredients

Some recipes specify to fry ingredients before adding them to the slow cooker. This is to give meat a good colour, start the cooking process for vegetables and enhance the flavour of alliums, such as garlic and onions. Also, raw spices such as ground coriander and cumin, need to be fried briefly to cook out the ‘raw’ flavour. Even if a dish cooks for eight or ten hours in a slow cooker, spices will still taste ‘raw’ if they aren’t fried first.

Many cooks prefer to cut the preparation time by not frying meat before adding it to the cooker. I usually find the texture at the end of cooking, however, less appetizing, although several of my recipes do skip this step and manage to work well. Be sure to pat meat dry before frying, and cook in batches, if necessary, to avoid overcrowding the pan. When the pan is too full, the temperature drops and the meat steams, rather than fries. Browning fatty ingredients, such as chorizo, before adding to the slow cooker helps to eliminate excessive fat from the finished dish.