Choosing a Slow Cooker

All the slow cooker main dishes in this book were developed for 3½- or 4-quart (3.3- or 3.8-L) slow cookers, which I find to be the most useful for a small family. Our family of three always has leftovers from dishes cooked in a cooker of this size, and rarely do I cook a slow cooker meal that requires more than three or four pounds (1.4 or 1.8 kg) of meat. I do use a larger, 6-quart (5.7-L) slow cooker for making stocks, since it doesn’t make much sense to prepare small batches of stock.