For the home cook, its usually a better strategy to spend money up front on quality, but ignore specialized tools, than try to cheap out. Alton Brown's advice about unitaskers is terrible, except for the first time you start cooking at home and don't know what you need.
Someone could spend days looking for the specific slow cooker you found and maybe your onions from it are good. The idea of saving 50 dollars by buying an unglazed piece of quarry from Lowe's for 5 bucks instead of a proper pizza stone is a popular myth. Anyone who has actually tried it, has probably wasted hours on the internet looking for it and when the idea came out was most likely wasting tons of gas going to multiple Lowe's.
Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks. Published recipes in a proper cookbook tend to be of higher quality, but its not always a guarantee. You get lucky every once in a while and find a hidden gem, but its almost never worth the effort to try non-established recipes as a beginner cook that can't read a recipe and immediately find red flags.
I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating.
Folks, just ignore this rude fellow. A slow cooker is essentially a low temperature heating element and a ceramic cooking vessel. The ceramic dissipates the low heat evenly even on the cheaper ones, and you get a result within tolerance so long as the regulator isn't crap. Just don't scratch up the glaze.
Your optimal slow cooker will have decent insulation (saves on energy) and if you crave luxury, a timer so that you can set it to automatically turn off or switch to "keep warm" after x hours.
You're also in luck because most people never use their slow cookers and eventually donate them to the local thrift shop, so you can pick them up super cheap to try out and decide if a slow cooker is for you. Once you've gotten a taste for slow cooked foods, you can start looking around for what tools will best serve your future culinary ambitions.
And no, you don't need a Le Creuset; that's just for snobs who like to tell everyone that they have Le Creuset. It won't make better carmelized onions.
Name the brand and model of your amazing 5 dollar slow cooker and give us some recipes to use in it.
Or people could just read dozens of reviews of a hundred year cooking vessel where they always complain about the price but reluctantly admit its better. Spending lots of money on cooking supplies as a novice is fraught with landmines of people wasting money, but out right dismissals of spending any money is also usually a red flag of someone just discovering cooking. A college sophomore in their first apartment probably doesn't need a $300 dollar knife, but an adult with a job that spends the money on something nice will get years if not decades on a much safer and more efficient knife they will get used to with occasional whetstone sharpening.
That's not consistent with my experience. Some knives will never take a good edge. But not all knives actually need a good edge. There are evidently different kinds of "stainless steel"; some kinds are immune to sharpening, some are quite good. But if I want a really sharp kitchen knife, it has to be carbon steel.
Carbon steel knives rust/pit easily - you have to clean them and dry them, you can't just leave them to dry in the sun.
Never a need for the home cook. Professional chefs pay for quality much like we do in tech. Ergonomics, edge retention, sharpness, and dozens of other factors can influence that $300 knife and whether its useful for a professional who chops food 8-10hrs a day, 5 days a week.
For the home cook, who chops maybe for 1/10th that weekly, not much reason beyond placebo.
Mind you, going mid-range with something like a Victorinox can be a good bet for home cooking. $50-ish chef's knife that holds its edge well enough that a honing steel will keep it sharp for a couple of months of once-or-twice-a-day use.
Nothing more annoying than squishing your tomatoes as you try to cut (except having to take time out to sharpen your knives all the time).
Money does not necessarily buy you quality, or if it does, a worthwhile amount of it. I have some nice knives that cost a decent amount, but guess what, my day to day knives are from a $15 ikea knife set that I bought half a decade ago. Are these knives going to last me decades? No, but with relatively minimal upkeep over the years, they're just as sharp as my nice knives. I will probably eventually throw them out when their handles start breaking, but at that point I will have gotten way more than my $15 of value out of them.
You named no brands for comparison and ignored a specific call out for comparison. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it true and as a novice cook this was the most obvious time I learned it.
Have you ever used a slow cooker? You seemed obsessed with naming brands and call it a specialized tools makes me think you have never used them.
It’s just the simplest tool which actually shines best to be used for everyday general cooking. You know when you don’t have the time to do fancy cooking and just need a tasty home made meal with minimal effort.
Yeah, you could probably get better caramelized onions if you know how to cook them, if you have time to prepare them, and if you give them your full attention, but I would bet for the regular person cooking for himself, they are likely to get better results with 1/10 of effort just doing what OP mentioned, with ANY slow cooker.
Theres a specific call out, with an admission of possibly being wrong when presented with evidence. Nobody has presented an amazing recipe or a specifically good device that makes good food.
I own a slow cooker, and it was given to me for free from a friend that had to quickly get rid of all of her personal belongings before being deported. The recipes in it are fine, often times actually very good, but theres also nothing about it that can't just be made better in a dutch oven with an extra hour or so on the stove. But the biggest proponents are the exact people I would not want cooking advice from.
Brands of what? Comparison of what? What specifically would you hope to be able to compare between either slow cookers or knives that would have any serious effect on how good the food you can use them to make is?
The most popular pots and pans for cooking do actually have a brand associated with them, even if its as big as Teflon. Not being able to name any, with a good or bad opinion, is comparable to not having a good or bad opinion about a novel. An old medium where its possible they have a valid new opinion, but usually a good indicator of the level of their opinion.
I think most cookware purchases are just what happened to be in the store at the time. Brands aren't considered much. Even for things like large appliances and cars this applies for a lot of people - and they're not necessarily wrong either.
My point was
>Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks.
The 15 minute caramelized onions, the cheap slow cooker onions, and other such things are nearly always lies, despite how much I wish them to be true.
I have used a number of different slow cooker brands over the years. Most were Crock-pot brand, but I've used others. I've never been able to tell the difference.
Sure there are tools where brand matters, but in the case of a slow cooker I'm putting the burden back on you: find me any brand that is actually inferior or better than the others. I don't think you can.
Non-slow-cooker things like a pressure cooker (ie instant-pot) with a slow cooker function are inferior to a real slower cooker, but they don't claim to be a slow cooker either.
> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better.
I can guarantee you that I can make caramelized onions that are better than pretty much anything you have ever had in your life, but it won't be because I have fancier tools. It will be because I'm using delicious homegrown onions that you can eat raw like apples, that you would be hard pressed to replicate.
What's my point with that anecdote? Don't really have one, much like yours.
> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating.
From what you've said, I think you don't know the subject matter[1] well enough to talk authoritatively about it.
Someone could spend days looking for the specific slow cooker you found and maybe your onions from it are good. The idea of saving 50 dollars by buying an unglazed piece of quarry from Lowe's for 5 bucks instead of a proper pizza stone is a popular myth. Anyone who has actually tried it, has probably wasted hours on the internet looking for it and when the idea came out was most likely wasting tons of gas going to multiple Lowe's.
Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks. Published recipes in a proper cookbook tend to be of higher quality, but its not always a guarantee. You get lucky every once in a while and find a hidden gem, but its almost never worth the effort to try non-established recipes as a beginner cook that can't read a recipe and immediately find red flags.
I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating.