When it comes to cooking your favourite dishes, it doesn’t get much better than using a slow cooker as there are many benefits to this form of cooking.
- Saves you money – slow cookers are an energy efficient way to cook food.
- Saves you time – minimal food preparation and hands-off-cooking allows you to get on with other things.
- Great for batch cooking, so you’ll always have something delicious to eat at the end of a long day.
- Delivers maximum flavour through the long and slow cooking process.
- Tenderises meat and other ingredients and keeps the dish deliciously succulent.
- Easy to use, add your ingredients, set the required temperature and time, and that’s it!
Let’s look at point 1 in more detail – slow cookers are one of the most energy efficient cooking appliances you’ll find in the kitchen. It is estimated that the average-sized slow cooker uses around 1.3 kWh over eight hours of cooking time, when you break this down to an hourly cost, based on the average cost of UK electricity in 2022 being close to 28p per kWh, this equates to just over 4.5p per hour or only 36p for the eight-hour duration.
If we then compare this to the cost of cooking the same dish for four hours using an average electric oven with a power rating of 1.8kWh at 150°C, it will cost just over £2 as opposed to 36p using the slow cooker. This means that for the price of cooking one meal in the oven, you could cook five in the slow cooker! However, if you don’t have a slow cooker then you can still use the oven.
