Slow Cooker Pasta Is The Trendy Cooking Technique You Might Want To Avoid

Be it pot roast, pulled pork, or lemon chicken soup, there are dozens of dishes that thrive under the leisurely authority of a slow cooker. Slow cooking yields a final product that's tender, deeply flavored, and perfected by the unhurried disposition of a patient storyteller. Although there is no shortage of slow cooker recipes, there are a few that are better suited for other cooking techniques. Take slow cooker pasta, for example, the trendy one-pot meal that is more reckless than flawless.

For a well-made dish, pasta should be tender with a little bite, striking a balance between silkiness and structure. Although the exact time varies by shape, dry pasta shouldn't need any more than 12 minutes of cooking. Fresh pasta requires even less time and is typically done within five minutes. Slow-cooked dishes usually take hours to complete, and although low heat is the name of the Crock-Pot game, pasta can lose its shape and turn into a soggy, formless mess when cooked for too long. Although it's easier, in theory, to throw your Sicilian-inspired ingredients into the slow cooker to let it do all the hard work for you, remedying improperly cooked pasta is more work in the end. Even the best slow cookers money can buy can't preserve the delicate nature of starchy pasta.

The best way to cook pasta is the old-fashioned way — boiling it in salted water until al dente. Contrary to the internet's fondness for novel cooking hacks, it's just as easy and hassle-free to make pasta the way nonnas have been doing it for generations as it is to prepare it in a Crock-Pot. If you can't resist the allure of a slow cooker, however, there are some ways to make use of it when cooking a pasta dish that won't compromise the integrity of the pasta itself.

You can slow-cook meat or veggies in a savory, tangy, or creamy Italian-inspired, dry herb-kissed sauce before introducing the pasta as the last and final step of the process. A slow cooker will tenderize your favorite proteins for a melt-in-your-mouth texture that marries harmoniously with properly cooked pasta. Combine pasta with slow-cooked meat like meatballs for spaghetti, braised beef for pappardelle, or sausage for rigatoni. You can even bake a side of pasta sauce-worthy bread in a slow cooker. Pretty much any component of your pasta dish besides the actual pasta can benefit from the slow cooker treatment. So, to use your Crock-Pot like a pro, keep your pasta in the stovetop pot.