Slow cooking soup, without a slow cooker

How to slow cook without a slow cooker

I’d been thinking a lot about saucepans and slow cookers when I made a discovery. OK it wasn’t ground breaking but it was new to me. Also it’s going to be fairly useful to me day to day.  

Sustainable gift wrap course

I discovered how to slow cook food without a slow cooker. Even without an oven or hob on at a low temperature for hours. I also discovered that I don’t need a soup pan to make soup!

Exciting isn’t it 🙂

My slow cook soup method:

  1. I chopped up the ingredients for carrot and rosemary soup. A couple of onions, a few leeks, some carrots, a sprig of rosemary and a bit of garlic.   
  2. I put them all in my large glass saucepan and covered the veg with some stock. I filled it up to as near the top of the pan as possible with stock. 
  3. I brought it to the boil (approx 10 minutes). During this time I also turned the oven on to 200 degrees C.  I had a pizza stone in the oven while it was heating up as the pizza stone retains heat well.
  4. Once the soup was boiling I turned off the gas and turned off the oven.
  5. I wrapped the pan up in a large towel and put it in the oven.
  6. I left it in the over for 1.5 hours
  7. When I took it out it was very tasty and steaming hot as you can see from the video above!  

I usually make soup in my soup pan which makes around 6 portions of soup a time.  I thought I would have made less soup because I used a smaller pan. However, because the water had nowhere to evaporate to, it all stayed in the pan. I made just as much soup as I would normally.  This was great news on two counts.  Firstly I don’t need to go out and buy a new soup pan to replace my 10 year old scratched and damaged one. Secondly it means that there is far less moisture being released into my kitchen.  This is good because our extractor fan doesn’t work well and we often have problems with damp and condensation.

Casserole without a slow cooker

I got a bit carried away with the slow cooking and then attempted to make a casserole for dinner.  I think it would have gone well except that I only left it for 1.5 hours.  It had chopped potatoes in it , and I should have cooked them for longer before I put them in the oven. It was edible-ish but some of my family members weren’t too impressed.  I think I will stick to experimenting on myself until I have perfected!

Speaking of experimenting, my next experiment is making zero waste veg stock following Jen Gale’s (and Mommy Emu’s) instructions (read them here). I am not going to follow the method I used above because it involves heating up the oven as well as using the hob. I want to save the energy used to heat up the oven and go even more low energy!  

The experiment is currently in progress and I’m going to tell you all about it tomorrow! After that I promise I will try to keep my posts about alternatives to slow cookers to a minimum (emphasis on try – I’m like a kid with a new toy at the moment) and get back to my task for the year which is making £10,000 from our home (read more here)!

Comments

  1. Zoe

    My pizza stone is from the Pampered Chef – it is a medium round stone with handles on their site. Since doing this experiment, I have now ditched the oven method and am using a well insulated freezer bag to make soup in (i.e. filled with towels and woolcool – I got the woolcool from Abel and Cole).

    I didn't see that site you mentioned, but it looks very interesting – off to have a read!

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