Healthy Cooking 101: Baking in a Slow Cooker

Hello everyone. Earlier this week, I decided to dive into the cookbook below and try a few recipes. Something stood out in this book, the author has several recipes, such as cakes and bread, that you don’t normally think to make in a slow cooker. One in particular that stood out, “Buttery Coconut Bread”, and decided to give it a try. AND, in just 4 hours, I had a loaf of bread, made in a slow cooker.

Why use a slow cooker to make bread?

Why in the world would you make a loaf of quick bread in a slow cooker, when you can make it in the oven in a fraction of the time? There are health benefits to making foods at a low/slow temperature and pace. (1,2)

• Retain natural oils
• Retain moisture
• Retains nutritional content of food – many vitamins are destroyed at high temperatures. Cooking low and slow retains the vitamin content.
• Improves taste, texture and flavor of food
• High temp cooking can chemically alter food, often resulting in carcinogens and toxins in the food.

Ingredients

Due to copyright, I’ll list the ingredients, but not the amounts. This article is more about technique than the actual recipe.

• butter
• eggs
• coconut oil
• vanilla extract
• liquid stevia
• almond flour
• coconut flour
• protein powder
• baking powder

Mixing the batter

I first mixed the liquid ingredients together in a bowl. In a smaller bowl, I mixed the dry ingredients together. I added the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients.

I added the batter to a greased 8″ x 4″ bread pan.

The recipe indicates to “place the pan on a rack in a slow cooker.” Well, I didn’t have a rack, so I made 4 balls of aluminum foil and placed them in the bottom of my slow cooker.

I then placed the bread pan on top of the foil. You don’t want the pan setting directly on the heating element, which is the purpose of this step.

Here’s what the bread looked like prior to cooking:

I set the slow cooker temperature on “low” . The recipe indicates to cook for 3-4 hours. I checked mine after 3 hours. I left it another 30 minutes.

Here’s what it looked like after 3 1/2 hours

The results? How did I like this bread?

Well…to be honest, I didn’t really care for this coconut bread, and probably won’t make it again. In fact, I ended up throwing it away. HOWEVER, I did enjoy the slow cooking bread technique and am anxious to try other forms of quick bread to see how well this technique works. This cookbook has many other slow cooker “baking” recipes I’m anxious to try as well, such as carrot cake, lime-raspberry custard cake, brownie chocolate cake, gingerbread, delectable peanut butter cup cake, almond golden cake, and pound cake…to name a few. I’ll let you know if/when I try any of them.

Until next time, namaste my friends

Tamara

Sources

1. http://www.superyumrecipe.com/low-heat-temperature-cooking-healthy-benefits/
2. https://metabolichealing.com/properly-preparing-your-food-low-temperature-cooking-guidelines/