Reader question: The one-pot holiday meal sounds great! If you had no oven available and were to make this in a crock pot how long would you cook it on high for? Four hours? Thanks! ~Katee, Calgary, AB, Canada
Hi Kate. I do love the Holiday in One Pot recipe Glorious One-Pot Meal, too! In fact, you can even watch a video demonstration of that recipe here. But when it comes to tossing it into a crock pot, that’s a different story because crock pots cook so differently than do Dutch ovens at high heat.
The main differences between the infusion cooking used in a Glorious One-Pot Meal and a the slow cooking in a crock pot are:
1. Glorious One-Pot Meals cook fast and at high heat while crock pots cook slowly at low heat. Even the High option on a crock pot is nowhere near the 450 F degrees needed to cook a Glorious One-Pot Meal in less than one hour.
2. GOPMs are layered and the ingredients maintain their integrity during the cooking process. Crock pot meals are stirred and cooked until the cellular walls of the ingredients have broken down.
3. GOPMs only need water or other liquid when they include dry goods like rice or pasta that need to by hydrated; crock pot cooking requires liquid and results in a stew or stew-like meal.
If you do not have access to an oven to cook your GOPM, you do have other options such as the stovetop method or a toaster oven.
To come back to your question, the answer is: I have no idea how long it would take, how it would turn out, what it would look like, or if it would even work in a crock pot. While I do utilize a crock pot occasionally, I am by no means a crock pot expert because I get bored of the predictable stewy results.
Sorry that I can’t be more helpful, but perhaps others have converted GOPMs into crock pot meals and will leave their experiences in the comments below.
