Guest post by Angela Coffman, The Grocery Shrink
A slow cooker cooks while you do other things, does it without heating up your kitchen; and tenderizes the toughest cuts of meats. I <3 my slow cooker.
6 Tips for Using a Slow Cooker
1. Use a Christmas Tree timer to turn your crock on when you want to. This especially useful for breakfast recipes that cook for less than 8 hours. Use wisdom when dealing with raw meats to avoid bacteria growth.
2. Many traditional recipes can be converted to slow cooking. Use this guide from Taste of Home.
3. For recipes that you want to keep from getting soggy on the top like apple crisp or quick bread, you can place paper towels or a cloth under the lid to capture the condensation.
4. You can use your slow cooker to make dry beans to use in recipes and save a bundle over buying canned. Place 2 cups of sorted and rinsed dry beans in a slow cooker with 6 cups of water. (You can soak beans overnight first, but it works fine if you don’t.) Add 2 tsp of salt and cook on low for 6-8 hours or on high for 3-4 hours. You can add garlic, onion, cumin or bay leaf as they cook for flavor if you like. (Check out this post on how to cook beans in a slow cooker.)
5. Freeze your own slow cooker meals in gallon size bags, thaw them all the way or just enough to get the food out of the bag and cook on high for 4-5 hours or low for 6-8 hours. Meats in marinades with veggies or stews work awesome this way.
6. Most slow cooker recipes call for cream of soup recipes. If you prefer to use more natural ingredients substitute half as much broth instead, then stir in the other half as cream cheese, sour cream, or yogurt at the end. (Or make your own Cream of Chicken Soup or keep Cream-Of Soup Mix on hand.)
Slow Cooked Cinnamon Rolls for Breakfast
Dough:
- 1 cup warm water
- 1 cup quick oats (or old fashioned oats chopped with a smack chopper)
- 2 Tbs honey
- 2 tsp yeast
- 1 egg
- 1 Tbs oil
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 cup unbleached flour
- 1 1/2- 2 cups whole wheat flour (I used home ground hard white wheat and purchased the wheat berries from Walmart.)
Filling:
- 4 oz cream cheese (I used Neufchatel)
- ¼ cup brown sugar (or sucanat)
- 1 tsp cinnamon
Topping:
- 1 cup sour cream or yogurt
- ¾ cup brown sugar (or sucanat)
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 2 tsp cinnamon
Dough:
1. Combine the water and oats. Let stand for 15 minutes to soften the oats.
2. Add honey and yeast. Then the egg, oil and 1 cup of unbleached flour. Mix well then stir in salt and additional flour to make a dough that comes together from the sides of the bowl. (I like to do the mixing in my kitchen aid mixer with the dough hook.)
3. Lightly oil the dough and let it rest covered with a cloth, 30 minutes to 1 hour. This allows the gluten to relax so you will be able to roll the dough out without too much spring action.
4. Punch down dough and roll out on a silicone mat or pastry cloth into a large rectangle ¼ inch thick.
5. Beat together cream cheese, brown sugar and cinnamon. Add a little milk if necessary to make it spreadable. Spread filling onto dough.
6. Roll up and cut into 12 pieces with a long piece of dental floss.
7. Place the rolls inside a cold, greased slow cooker giving equal space around each roll for rising.
8. Beat together topping ingredients and pour over all.
9. Cover with the slow cooker lid and use a Christmas Tree Timer to set the slow cooker to come on High 1 ½ hours before breakfast. The rolls will raise slowly overnight (since all the ingredients were cold) and then bake just in time for breakfast.
Angela Coffman is a mom of 6 and blogs over at groceryshrink.com and centsablyfit.com. After paying off $87,000 in debt in a little less than 6 months, she started her blog to encourage other families making the same journey. She has been featured on the 700 club; TLC’s Extreme Cheapskates, and local news, radio and magazines.
This looks yummy! I am about to start this recipe now. Already pinned:) Thanks for sharing! We do not have an oven yet, so crock-pot baking is a treat for my family. We are missionaries in Asia and ovens are super expensive. We are getting one in a month second-hand. We are excited!! Keep up the yummy recipes!
Wow! Thanks for sharing that with me. 🙂 I hope they turn out great for you! I post a crock pot recipe each Friday.
If you wanted these at a different time of day , how many hours should you let them rise before you turn them on ?
I would just keep a watch on them and when they were doubled you could turn them on. 🙂
Julia, If it bothers you trade it out for a tablespoon of water or so. We devoured ours and no one got sick. We did use farm eggs. And of course it all gets cooked through before eaten.
I’m just curious about the egg in the dough. Is it really OK to leave the dough out that long with raw egg in it? I would love to try this, but even though we have our own eggs, I’m not sure that is safe. Any thoughts?
Hi Stacy,
How would this recipe work with the active yeast packets that should be added directly to the flour?
Thanks 🙂
The yeast packets will work. It’s just less expensive to buy yeast in a jar. Use what you already have :).
OK, I am gearing up to try this with gluten/dairy free ingredients(son on a special diet) He would LOVE to wake up to this on Sunday. By any chance, have you heard any reports from anyone making them this way? Thanks for the great post, and tip about the towel!
I have seen gluten free cinnamon rolls on Pinterest and I don’t see why they wouldn’t work! 🙂
Thanks for the paper towel idea. I haven’t heard that one before. Learn something new everyday!
And I imagine when we stop learning, we’ll be dead. lol
Great tips. Thanks!
I agree!
I love the Christmas timer idea to delay cooking… BUT… if you’re cooking something with already defrosted chicken it’s not a good idea to let it sit there at room temperature on a timer. I seem to recall reading that the chicken gets out of the ‘food safe’ range and doesn’t heat up quickly enough to actually kill the bacteria once the cooking starts.
You’re exactly right. 🙂 That’s why Angela said “Use wisdom when dealing with raw meats to avoid bacteria growth.”
Yum! I’m writing the ingredients down right now to make for Sunday breakfast. Is this a recipe you’d recommend putting a towel under the lid for? I am also wondering about fitting 12 rolls in my 5 qt cooker like Cecilia. What if I cut less out of the roll, would they be too tall then? Finally, we only have mint floss, any other suggestions for cutting the roll? Can’t wait to try this!!
I’ll let Angela answer most of the questions, but I’ll pipe in and say that I never use floss to cut my rolls – I always use my tomato knife…and if you don’t have one of those, you’re totally missing out! 🙂
I’m sure mint floss would be fine. You’re just using it to cut, not cook with.
I hadn’t heard of the “place paper towels or a cloth under the lid” tip to capture condensation. That is great! I’ve previously had problems with the rice in recipes getting too mushy or sauces being too thin. I’ll have to see if using a cloth helps with this. Thanks!
Yep – Angela is pretty much a complete genius.
Thank you for this recipe. I’m intrigued and excited to try this; I’ve never baked in my crock pot before and thought you had to have a special insert. I have a question though. I see that your recipe is for 12 rolls. I assume those are supposed to be placed in the bottom of the crock pot, not stacked. But, I don’t think even my biggest crock will allow me to do that (I don’t have any oval shaped pots right now, just the round tall ones). Am I understanding correctly that they cannot be stacked at all?
I’ll get Angela to answer this for you – but I just wanted to let you know that I bake in my crock all the time! We even have a recipe on here for baking bread in there. And in Crock On there are several cake recipes! 🙂
Cecilia, Yes, the recipe makes 12 rolls and is for an oval crock. I’ve never stacked them before, but if you try it in your smaller one, let us know how it goes. I’m not sure how I would survive without my oval crock. I put whole chickens in it, 2 lbs of dry beans…lots of stuff. And it has a latching lid so it will travel :). They are $30 or less–be something good to use swagbucks on, or put on your next wishlist.
I second the oval slow cooker!
Thank you both for the replies. We are a family of 9 and often use our electric roaster for big jobs like 2 or 3 chickens at a time, or a couple of roasts. I wonder if that would work for the rolls? I had an oval crock pot, but it died. 🙁 Maybe someday, but our debts need paid first. 🙂
YEAH! Debts first! I love how you think!
If you are freezing meals to put into the slow cooker, and you regularly forget to take them out to thaw in the fridge the night before, plop the bag into a mixing bowl (or similar) in the freezer until they are frozen so that they are a shape that will FIT into the slow cooker! Then you can cook from frozen (just up low to high or add a couple of hours of time).
Nothing is more frustrating than a slow cooker meal you have to chip at to make the stupid lid fit.
Smart tip! Thanks for sharing, Christine! 🙂
I have frozen meals in the shape of the crock pot for about a year or so but have recently found a way to improve this. They sell crock pot liners (made of plastic so I’m sure they’re not for everyone) so now I freeze the dinner in the shape of the crock pot inside a liner. Easy-peasy!!
Yum!
Double yum!