Slow Cooking by Ingredient

Slow cookers are almost always used to cook recipes that combine a variety of ingredients, so it is a bit difficult to talk about the specific needs of particular ingredients during slow cooking. Yet I always find it helpful to understand the affinities and tolerances of ingredients when figuring out how best to cook them. The following table will give you an overview of how to slow-cook various ingredients, with the caveat that you will probably never cook any of them alone. As a result, recipes including these ingredients will probably reflect a compromise that accommodates the needs of all of the ingredients in the recipe.