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" During the month that we developed the recipes for our October slow cooker story, I got to see the sun rise outside our test kitchen windows in the mornings. That&amp;#039;s because I wanted to see if the dishes could cook in the appliance &amp;quot;all day,&amp;quot; about 8 hours or so, to emulate what most home cooks experience: wake up, throw the ingredients in the slow cooker, go to work, and come home to dinner in the machine. Of course, you can do that with any dish, but you may not love the taste of the results. All is not lost, however. Here are some tips and techniques I learned after nearly 50 recipe tests with the slow cooker:  1. Understand how the slow cooker and its settings works. Most models bring the mixture to a boil, then boil or simmer it for the time programmed. The high and low settings determine either how quickly that mixture comes to a boil (faster on high) or how hard the mixture boils (a gentler simmer on low). 2. Learn how to concentrate flavors. Because the slow cooker is essentially boiling your ingredients and even adding water to the mixture as it creates steam that&amp;#039;s trapped by the lid, the flavors of the dish are going to be diluted. To heighten the intensity of flavor without adding excessive sodium or using processed ingredients, we sometimes brown meats or vegetables first (as in our Pot Roast) or add super savory natural ingredients, such as aromatic herbs and spices. 3. Preserve the texture. The reason many of our dishes can&amp;#039;t withstand cooking for 8 hours or more is because the proteins and vegetables break down. In a word, they turn to mush. If you don&amp;#039;t cook the mixture long enough, the meat&amp;#039;s tough and the vegetables hard. Cook them too long though and the meat goes beyond tender and juicy into an unappealing zone of being simultaneously dry and soft enough for the toothless. Each of our October recipes gives the cooking time and setting that yielded the best results. 4. Use the Keep Warm function wisely. Sharon Franke and Paul Hope tested slow cookers in GH&amp;#039;s Kitchen Appliances Lab and noted that nearly all new models of slow cookers have a &amp;quot;keep warm&amp;quot; option. This switches on after the cooking stops and maintains a &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot; temperature for the food until you&amp;#039;re ready to eat. We tested our recipes on a number of different slow cooker makes and models and found that some &amp;quot;keep warm&amp;quot; options kept the food perfectly tasty, while others continued boiling the food, leaving it overcooked. After you make a dish or two in your machine, you&amp;#039;ll know whether or not your &amp;quot;keep warm&amp;quot; option is a good one. 5. Plan ahead. Once you&amp;#039;ve determined whether your &amp;quot;keep warm&amp;quot; option works well, you can make most dishes in advance of even the long slow cooking times. But note that there are always exceptions. For example, I tried cooking the soup base for the Mediterranean Seafood Stew for the 3 hours needed to keep some texture in the vegetables, then let it switch to keep warm for a few hours more. When I turned the setting back to high and added the seafood, it took too long to cook through and made the seafood unpleasantly soft. In this particular case, the seafood has to be added right after the soup base finishes cooking and can only stay in for a maximum of 40 minutes. If you don&amp;#039;t already have a slow cooker, check out the recommendations from our Kitchen Appliances department and see how these appliances use less energy than traditional cooking methods, according to The Daily Green. To see how we test these and other recipes, come on a tour of the Good Housekeeping Research Institute. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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