This is part four of a five part series on different ways I use my slow cooker. This series is a part of my month long “5 Days With My Appliances” series..
On a cold winter day, nothing beats a bowl of warm soup. Even better if you arrive home and that soup is already pipping hot. With a slow cooker at your disposal this dream can be a reality. I would not necessarily do any soup in a slow cooker. A slow cooker is good for those soups that have ingredients that need a good amount of time to cook. Some examples include any dried beans, split peas, or lentils. Below you will find some recipes for soups using these ingredients. These recipes don’t necessarily call for slow cookers, but they can be adapted for them. If you have a slow cooker like mine you can set it to how many hours you want. I can’t guarantee the exact amount of time it will take in your cooker. Soup is a meal you can experiment with.
1. Bean & Bacon Soup
2. Split Pea w/Potatoes Soup
3. Alton Brown’s Lentil Soup
One soup that I never cook in a slow cooker is chicken noodle soup. I prefer to cook an entire chicken, and then with the leftovers make a quick soup in a pot on my stove top. If I did cook chicken noodle all day, the noodles would end up total mush. Also the noodles, chicken, carrots, celery, and anything else you put it would also just have the same taste. I like everything in my soup to have it’s full flavor still intact. This is the same point I made when I talked of making pot roast in a slow cooker. I really want to drive home with my readers to not just dump, cook, and eat. Add some additional flavors to your soup near the end or at the end of the cooking. Never miss an opportunity to improve your food. To my bean soup, I add liquid smoke at the end and puree some of the soup to thicken it. To my split pea soup, I like to add freshly cooked bacon at the end of the process, so it still retains some of it’s crispiness, giving the soup an added texture.
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