The 3 Best Slow Cookers for Easy Meals

By Donna Currie

Slow cookers are the ideal hands-off, safe cooking appliance for foods that would otherwise spend a long time on the stove or in the oven. A busy cook can put food in the cooker before work and come home to a fully cooked meal, or start it at lunchtime so it’s ready for dinner. Food expert Renu Dhar says that when making her favorite Indian dishes, the gentle heat of a slow cooker “marries the flavors of the spice with other ingredients, resulting in a well-rounded flavor.” 

De’Longhi’s 6-quart Livenza 7-in-1 Multi-Cooker is our top recommendation among all the slow cookers we researched and tested thanks to its fast, even heating, cool exterior and useful settings and accessories. The Instant Electric Round Dutch Oven is the model you should choose if you want a slow cooker that can sear your food most effectively, or one that comes with a Dutch oven that can be used separately from the cooking base. Hamilton Beach’s Portable 6-Quart Set & Forget Digital Programmable Slow Cooker is our pick if you want a lower-price option. 

If you’d like to read how we vetted and tested slow cookers and which experts we consulted, scroll down for more detail.

Best overall slow cooker

Pros

• Fast, consistent heat

• Exterior stays cool

• Rice-cooking feature eliminates the need for a dedicated appliance

• Comes with a useful basket/rack accessory

Cons 

• Relatively high price

• Documentation for baking function is lacking

Specs

• Settings: Low, medium, and high slow cook; steam; sear/brown; bake; rice

• Pot weight: 3.2 pounds

De’Longhi’s Livenza 7-in-1 Multi-Cooker was the only cooker in our tests that reached its cooking temperature in the first hour, and it kept that temperature in our four-hour water test and eight-hour cooking test. It was the second best at searing and browning when we cooked ground beef and onions for spaghetti sauce, and it produced a brown crust on a pork roast before braising. The exterior of the cooker also stayed the coolest, reaching just 89 degrees Fahrenheit after four hours of slow cooking. Plus, it has three slow cook settings, so the cook can choose low, medium or high.

The high slow-cook temperature was below the boiling point, which is preferable, but when higher heat was needed, the sear, bake and steam settings handled that with ease. When making ghee, the butter melted faster than in our other cookers, then settled into a gentle slow cook to evaporate the water. We found the rice setting worked perfectly in cooking as little as one cup of rice, with the unit sensing when the rice was done and switching to a keep-warm setting. This cooker included one of the most useful extras of the models we tested: a basket/rack. We used it when steaming cauliflower, and it would be useful anytime you want to keep the food off the bottom of the pot. 

The handles on the nonstick cooking pot are large and comfortably shaped, so we always felt confident lifting it from the base, which is itself easy to grab and hold by the handles.The pot comes only in black, and while that and the lid are technically dishwasher safe, De’Longhi recommends washing by hand to preserve the nonstick finish. It would take a lot of dishwasher real estate, anyway, and even when we left it unwashed overnight, all we needed was a soft sponge and dish soap to clean it.

The instructions for the Bake setting weren’t as clear as we’d like, but we figured out how to make a cake by covering a loaf pan with foil and resting it in a small amount of water in the pot. It didn’t bake as evenly as a standard oven would—the top felt sticky instead of dry, and the sides and bottom browned more than the top—but it was passable. The Bake setting can also be used to cook foods directly in the pot, like baked mac and cheese.

Best slow cooker for searing

Instant Pot

Electric Round Dutch Oven

$180 at Amazon

$ 230 Save $ 50

This Dutch oven can be used in its base, on the stovetop or in the oven. It was the best for searing, with enough settings to make it versatile.

Pros

• Fast, consistent heat

• Dutch oven can be used in oven and on the stove

• Dutch oven comes in four colors

Cons 

• Higher price

• Braise setting is too hot

Specs

• Settings: Slow cook, sear/brown, braise, two levels of manual heat

• Pot weight: 9.75 lbs

Instant’s Electric Round Dutch Oven has only one slow cook temperature setting, but it also includes sear mode, an aggressive braise mode and two levels of manual settings for higher and lower temperatures. 

The searing worked well for cooking ground beef and onions for spaghetti sauce, and the Electric Round Dutch Oven quickly browned a pork roast before braising. Unfortunately, the braise setting was too high for a true braise and there was some minor burning. The braising information in the manual is confusing, suggesting temperature controls that aren’t available on the device. Fortunately, the slow cook and manual options are just fine for braising and for other types of slow cooking. 

This slow cooker took its time getting up to its cooking temperature from a cold start—it was about 30 degrees lower than the De’Longhi at the one-hour mark, reaching the 180-degree point within the next hour—but beginning on the sear setting can speed that up. It worked well for making ghee, although we had to watch carefully at the end to make sure we pulled it before we burned the proteins, since the pot retains heat so well. 

The slow cooker’s exterior stayed cool enough to be comfortable throughout our cooks. Because it’s solid cast iron, the lid needs to be lifted if you want to peek at your food (in contrast with transparent glass lids), but the pot retains heat well enough that it’s not going to ruin a long cook. The handles are similar to all stovetop Dutch ovens—sturdy but a little small. Not surprisingly, the cooking pot was the heaviest of the bunch that we tested, which might be off-putting for some cooks who don’t want to add weightlifting to their kitchen routine or otherwise have difficulty with heavy objects. 

Instant includes small silicone holders that fit onto the handles, and a round silicone trivet for the pot. While the trivet was handy, if it was slightly larger we could have used it for the lid as well. The Dutch oven is available in several different pot colors to match other enameled cast iron pieces that are already part of the collection, or to coordinate with kitchen décor.When it’s time for cleaning, the pot and lid are dishwasher safe, but Instant says hand-washing is preferred to maintain the enamel coating. We didn’t have problems hand-washing during testing, and even when we had a little burning, it was easy enough to scrape off the residue and clean with a sponge and dish soap.

Best lower-price slow cooker

Hamilton Beach

Portable 6-Quart Set & Forget Digital Programmable Slow Cooker

$80 at Amazon

An old-school slow cooker with a ceramic inner pot. The locking lid makes it easy to take to a potluck or party.

Pros

• Probe setting to monitor meat temperature

• Lock-on lid for transport

• Pot can be used in the oven

Cons 

• Exterior gets hot

• No sear setting

• Pot is heavy and potentially breakable

Specs

• Settings: Defrost, manual, program, probe

• Pot weight: 6.5 lbs

Based on research, experience and talking to the experts, we expect most sub-$100 slow cookers with ceramic pots to perform about the same: They’re slower to heat than our picks above, but once they hit their temperature, they hold it well. It’s their extra features and accessories that set them apart, and that’s where the Hamilton Beach Portable 6-Quart Set & Forget Digital Programmable Slow Cooker excels. 

The probe setting (along with the included probe thermometer) makes it easy to cook a chicken or roast to a specific temperature, something we tested with our pork roast and found to be accurate. This feature, and the lock-on lid for easy transport, are what set this model apart from the rest in the price range.

While the cooking settings are simple, this Hamilton Beach has several options, including one to use when starting with frozen foods, and both manual (high to low temperatures) and program settings (including a timer) for slow cooking. This is the only slow cooker we tested without a sear/brown setting, and the recipes in our tests suffered from the lack of browning. If you want to be able to sear in your cooker, choose one of the other models above.

Ceramic pots are more prone to breaking than the nonstick or iron models we recommend above. The upside is that, if they don’t break, they tend to be long-lasting since there’s no coating that would degrade over time. 

The main downside of this model is that the exterior gets quite hot during cooking, reaching 162 degrees after four hours of slow cooking, which is hot enough to cause a burn. You should treat it with the same care you would a pot on the stove. The pot was also the second heaviest in our tests. It’s safe for both oven and microwave use, which could be handy for reheating leftovers. Unlike the other two models we recommend, it’s dishwasher safe without any caveats, although we opted to hand-wash it most of the time and didn’t have any problems getting it clean. 

Others you should know about

Crockpot is almost a generic term for slow cookers, but it actually is a brand—and a very popular one with a larger range of models at varied prices. We weren’t able to include Crockpot models in this round of testing, but we still feel confident that our picks offer a better combination of features, or more useful accessories, for their prices.

Ninja’s Foodi PossibleCooker Pro performed well and had features we liked, but, compared with our top pick, it wasn’t as good at keeping a consistent temperature. It’s the only slow cooker we tested with sous vide and bread proofing settings, both of which worked well enough but weren’t super accurate.

The 5.3-quart Calphalon Slow Cooker with Digital Timer and Programmable Controls is a great pick for someone who is cooking smaller batches and prefers simple controls. This cooker doesn’t have any extra settings—just high or low slow cooking and the cooking time. It took a while to reach its cooking temperature when we tested it with water, and the exterior got warm during cooking, but not painfully so. 

VitaClay slow cookers, including the VM7900-8 Smart Organic Multi-Cooker, fit a slightly different niche than the others we researched because they use porous, unglazed clay pots instead of ceramic. Traditional slow cooker recipes need to be adjusted since the Vitaclays allow much more evaporation. They’re worth a look for cooks who know they like cooking in clay, but because of their unique nature, head-to-head comparisons during testing would have been difficult.

Wolf Gourmet is known for high-end appliances, including the Programmable 6-in-1 Multi Cooker. With its stainless steel cooking pot and sous vide and temperature probe settings, it’s likely to be a solid performer. The price is so far above the rest of the pack, with so little potential benefit, that we declined to test it.

Many countertop pressure cookers like the Instant Pot have settings for slow cooking, and although our expert, Sarah Copeland, likes them, another expert, Bruce Weinstein, disagrees. He explained that the slow cook setting on these devices is hotter than those of traditional slow cookers, and many models only have a high slow-cook setting. They can work if there’s no other option, but a dedicated slow cooker is the better choice for cooks who like slow-cooked soups, stews and braises.

How we picked

Trust us

I’ve written about food and tested cooking equipment for well over a decade, with work appearing on Serious Eats and The Spruce Eats as well as in a variety of print publications. I’m also the author of “Make Ahead Bread,” a book of bread recipes that are prepped ahead for baking the following day. To better understand slow cookers and what to look for when testing them, I spoke to Bruce Weinstein, co-author of “The Great American Slow Cooker Book: 500 Easy Recipes for Every Day and Every Size Machine”; food writer, blogger, culinary instructor and personal chef Renu Dhar, who often prepares Indian foods in a slow cooker; and Sarah Copeland, the author of “Instant Family Meals: Delicious Dishes From Your Slow Cooker, Pressure Cooker, Multicooker, and Instant Pot.”

We tested

We put five slow cookers through their paces, running the same tests and cooking the same recipes. The goal was to find the models that were easy to use, safe and efficient. While all of them were able to cook the recipes we selected, when we were done, we had favorites. Here’s how we chose. 

• Consistent temperature:

  Slow cookers are supposed to cook food slowly, at a safe but low temperature held consistent over time. To measure the minimum operating temperature, we filled each slow cooker with two quarts of water, turned it to the lowest slow-cook setting, and checked the water temperature at 1, 2, and 4 hours. We looked for cookers that achieved a high-enough temperature quickly and kept the same temperature throughout the cooking time. 

• Cooking performance:

  We prepared a meaty spaghetti sauce in each slow cooker to test their ability to cook a thick liquid without scorching and to test their searing function, followed by braised pork shoulder roasts with onions and peppers to see how the cookers would handle a large piece of meat. We also made ghee to test the cookers’ ability to handle a small amount of food and cook gently, as recommended by Dhar. (Slow cooking the butter evaporates the water and allows the fat to gently separate from the milk solids.) Since the slow cookers we tested had so many extra features in addition to “set it and forget it,” we also tested those by cooking chicken sous vide, cooking rice and more to determine whether they were actually useful features or just extra buttons. “There is no space for single-use cookers in a modern family’s budget, nor likely in their kitchen,” says Copeland. Having a cooker with extra features might make you more likely to use it more often. 

• Size, weight and safety:

  One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to slow cookers. “If you usually cook large stews, then go big,” Weinstein says. “But you cannot make oatmeal for two people in a six-quart cooker.” Copeland recommended walking around the kitchen and imagining where the cooker would be stored and how easy it would be to retrieve and put away. “That automatically eliminates some cookers by size, shape or usability.” 

We assembled, used, disassembled, washed and reassembled each slow cooker we tested multiple times. The ease of cleaning plays a part in whether someone wants to use the cooker often or not, Copeland told us. We weighed the empty pots, sans lids, to determine how easy they would be to handle. And with safety in mind, we measured the exterior temperature of each slow cooker right below the handles at 2 and 4 hours of slow cooking.

Our experts

• Sarah Copeland

  , cookbook author who features slow cookers in her cookbook, “

  Instant Family Meals: Delicious Dishes from Your Slow Cooker, Pressure Cooker, Multicooker, and Instant Pot

  ” 

• Renu Dhar

  , food writer, blogger, culinary instructor, and personal chef who often uses a slow cooker for Indian foods, including ghee 

• Bruce Weinstein

  , co-author (with Mark Scarbrough) of “

  The Great American Slow Cooker Book: 500 Easy Recipes for Every Day and Every Size Machine

  ,” among numerous cookbooks on a variety of themes, including those that feature recipes for specific cooking equipment