Flexible time and temperature options ensure perfect results every time. Nothing is quite as yummy as the warm taste of comfort foods. Hamilton Beach® Large Slow Cookers make it easy to cook a big, tasty meal. Just prepare your fresh ingredients, place them in the crock, and go on your way.
If you can get past its awkward display panel layout, I think you’ll appreciate the value, performance, and transportability of this $59.99 Hamilton Beach slow cooker. The Crock-Pot has a lower profile design, so if maintaining counter or cabinet tidiness is a big priority, you might have a look at that one instead. And if you want something a bit more fancy, the $199.80 Ninja is a decent, if less portable choice for its oven mode and other advanced cooking features. All of that is a bit more involved than the simpler, set-and-forget Crock-Pot. It’s certainly not overly complex, but you might need to read through the manual once or twice to get it all down. I do wish the display was a bit more thoughtfully designed — it borders on clumsy.
The Ninja got hot very quickly, but it never reached boiling. Crockpot meals are the perfect solution for a busy family. Skip the dinnertime drive-through by adding healthy ingredients to your crock pot in the morning. Then, dinner is done by the time everyone returns home. There are great cookbooks designed for delish crockpot meal ideas.
They’ll also keep your meal warm when cooking is finished. For easy cleanup after the meal, simply put the removable stoneware and glass lid in the dishwasher. I also cooked a whole chicken using the Hamilton Beach Probe mode, where the slow cooker automatically switches to Warm when it reaches the preselected temperature. I periodically checked the probe temperature against the food thermometer we use in other testing and they were always within a couple degrees of each other.
Also, the removable stoneware is dishwasher safe for easy cleanup. Macaroni and cheese We also tested how well the slow cookers would handle more delicate ingredients, so we found a slow-cooker macaroni and cheese recipe and set it on Low for six hours. Now, macaroni and cheese is delicious and not particularly hard to make, but this recipe did not turn out well with any of the five slow cookers. In all fairness, that was the fault of the recipe rather than the slow cookers in this case. The recipe required eggs and it really turned out more like an eggy noodle casserole than it did melty macaroni and cheese.
If you select 160 degrees as the desired temperature for your chicken, make sure to put the probe in a spot where you think it will cook the slowest. That way, you can feel confident that the rest of the chicken is also cooked to at least 160 degrees. When you first turn on this slow cooker, the display will flash “SEL.” You need to select one of the three modes to continue.
On High, every model except the Frigidaire reached boiling, with the Ninja in the lead. The Frigidaire slow cooker never hamilton beach slow cooker exceeded 191 degrees. This is where we began to notice a pattern that would remain consistent throughout testing.
You might get better results if you’re willing to experiment, but prepare to burn through a lot of chicken to find the appropriate setting. Water boil We used this test to set a performance baseline — which slow cooker would reach the highest temperature the fastest, etc., and how (if at all) would that correlate hamilton beach slow cooker to the food tests? We tested the slow cookers for eight hours on Low and then for four hours on High. On Low, the Breville slow cooker began to boil the fastest and maintained that temperature for the remainder of the test. The Frigidaire followed, then the Crock-Pot, and then the Hamilton Beach.
If you pick program, you will need to use the up and down arrows to select a desired cooking time. Next, it will ask you to select a heat setting — either High or Low — then press enter, at which point it will start cooking. The display will alternate between the remaining cooking time and the heat setting, and it will automatically switch to Warm mode when the timer finishes counting down. Conclusion I really like this Hamilton Beach slow cooker. It offers all of the features I want from a slow cooker and none that I don’t.