The Best Slow Cooker Review

It’s not fancy, but the intuitive interface, locking lid, and modest price have made it the best deal for your money three years running—and it’s the only slow cooker with a heat probe to monitor the doneness of roasts and other meats.

In our most recent tests, the Set & Forget again proved better than the competition. It’s not fancy and performs about as well as many other cookers, but after 86 hours of research and testing, we’ve found that its intuitive interface, locking lid, and modest price make it the best deal for your money. It’s also the only slow cooker that comes with a heat probe to monitor the doneness of roasts, which we think makes it especially practical.

Furthermore, the biggest difference between them seems to be their features, not their cooking ability.We found that every model has particular flaws, and most of these machines—ranging from $30 to $180—seem to cook too hot. We should mention that we don’t think there’s a perfect slow cooker on the market. 1 However, the Set & Forget outperformed much more expensive models, and once we started asking experts, it kept cropping up as a favorite.

If the Set & Forget sells out, or if its price goes higher than around $50, we recommend the Crock-Pot 6-Quart Programmable Cook & Carry Slow Cooker. It costs more and lacks a heat probe and on-off alarm. But it does cook for 20 hours, compared with the Set & Forget’s 14, and looks more up-to-date (because it is); we like its handles and locking mechanism a little better, too.

If you’re fine with a small, old-school slow cooker without bells and whistles (like a timer), the Crock-Pot 4-Quart Manual Slow Cooker should serve you well. It has excellent user reviews and a low, low price to boot.

Why you should trust us

For this guide, we sought advice from the best slow-cooker experts we could find: Phyllis Pellman Good, author of the New York Times best-selling Fix-It and Forget-It cookbook series, and Stephanie O’Dea, author of the New York Times best-selling Make It Fast: Cook It Slow cookbook series and the blog A Year of Slow Cooking. Combined, these authors have logged countless hours making food in a wide range of cookers. We also scoured previous slow-cooker reviews (including those by America’s Test Kitchen [subscription required] and Consumer Reports) to develop a list of qualities that comprise a top-notch slow cooker. Over the past three years, we’ve examined more than 45 top-rated models, and tested a short list of finalists to find the best.

Christine Cyr Clisset, who wrote the original guide, has reviewed a huge variety of kitchen equipment for The Sweethome, including food processors, casserole dishes, and blenders, and has long-term tested the Set & Forget at home to make pulled pork, braised lamb shoulder, chicken, and pork stock overnight. Camille Chatterjee, the other half of our slow-cooker team, has edited recipes and food stories for Self, Redbook, and other publications (and is an avid home cook). For this guide, she researched this past year’s newest models before choosing two to test against the reigning pick.

Who should get this

“People, at the end of the day, are looking for something they can turn on in the morning and after eight hours the food won’t be completely pulverized or burned or no longer holding texture and flavor.” —Phyllis Pellman Good
Getting a slow cooker is worth it if you want more convenience in the kitchen—particularly if you’d like to cook food while you’re out of the house. With a modern, programmable slow cooker you choose the heat—low or high—and the cooking time. When the time is up, the machine kicks over to the warming setting. That way, you can prep your food before work and head to the office without worrying about your meal overcooking. Set it and forget it, indeed.

“People, at the end of the day, are looking for something they can turn on in the morning and after eight hours the food won’t be completely pulverized or burned or no longer holding texture and flavor,” said Pellman Good.

If you bring food to dinner parties and other get-togethers regularly, having a slow cooker on hand with a locking lid and silicone gasket to prevent spills can be seriously time-saving (and up your game from the usual lukewarm casseroles and salads). “I have an outlet in the back of my minivan, and I’ve had readers say they actually cook on road trips, and then they just pull over and eat on the way. Certainly for tailgating or potlucking it works great,” O’Dea said.

Slow cooker vs. electric pressure cooker

If you want something more versatile than a slow cooker—and you can spend between $120 and $250—consider an electric pressure cooker, which comes with multiple cooking settings. On the pressure-cooker setting, these machines raise the boiling point of water, decreasing cook times by up to two-thirds. On the slow-cook setting these machines operate exactly as designated slow cookers. After filling them with ingredients for a stew or other slow-cooking dish, you choose from several heat and cooking-time options, and leave the machine to make dinner while you’re at work or out of the house. When the cook time is up, the cooker kicks over to a warming setting. We cover the differences between slow cookers, pressure cookers, and rice cookers in more detail here.

For our 2016 update, we made batches of presoaked cannellini beans in the Hamilton Beach Set & Forget 6-Quart Programmable Slow Cooker and in our two favorite electric pressure cookers—the Instant Pot IP-DUO60 and the Breville Fast Slow Pro—on their slow cook settings. Each of these machines turned out toothsome beans with little breakage and the batches were hardly distinguishable from one another.

If you just want a dedicated slow cooker—or something that can double as a serving piece on a buffet—you’ll likely be happy with the Set & Forget. Springing for an electric pressure cooker (the Instant Pot, in particular) is worth doing if you think you’ll use its various cooking modes (such as rice, porridge, or steam settings).

How we picked and tested

Slow cookers come in a range of sizes, from 1- to 7-quart capacity. The diminutive 1-, 2-, and 3-quart cookers work best for making appetizers, such as dips. Most of these small pots have only manual controls. The next sizes are 4- to 5-quart cookers, which work well for singles and couples who want to make one meal, and maybe a round of leftovers. Most of these are manual machines, although some are programmable (see The competition).

We focused our research on programmable 6- to 7-quart models, because they’re big enough to make a meal for a family of four, with leftovers to spare. America’s Test Kitchen and Consumer Reports also focused their reviews on this size cooker. Both Pellman Good and O’Dea recommended programmable models with timers, locking lids, and a silicone gasket to prevent spills.

To our surprise, Pellman Good recommended using a model with a heat probe. We’d found this feature only on the Hamilton Beach Set & Forget, and had initially discounted it as a gimmick. Yet Pellman Good explained: “I hate overcooked meat. I always encourage people to use a meat thermometer to test a roast to see if it’s done. If you don’t need to lift the lid, it’s really helpful because lifting the lid lets heat out.”

Programmable slow cookers have timers that range from 12 to 26 hours. At first, we thought the longer timer would be an advantage, but Pellman Good pointed out that the longest slow cooker recipes last 8 to 10 hours, so a 12- to 15-hour timer should be sufficient. If food sits at the warming setting too long, you could completely dry out your dish. Some people might appreciate a longer timer (such as those cooking for the Sabbath). In that case, a model like the Crock-Pot, which has a 20-hour timer, may be the best option.

We also considered models with stovetop-safe inserts made of die-cast aluminum and other metals. Theoretically, you can brown your meat in the crock on the stovetop and save yourself an extra dish to wash. However, most slow cooker inserts have a nonstick coating, which isn’t ideal for high-heat searing. Extreme temperatures cause that coating to break down faster, diminishing its effectiveness. We’d rather sear a roast in a cast-iron skillet, and then transfer the meat to the crock. Even if you did brown the meat in the insert, you’d probably transfer the meat to another dish to drain off the fat from the crock, negating that extra saved dish.

A simple on-off light, so you can tell that the machine is actually cooking, can also prevent headaches. Many of the programmable cookers don’t have this, and sometimes it can be hard to determine at a glance whether the cooker is on. We still think the advantages of a programmable cooker outweigh this feature, though.

Like many small home appliances, most slow cookers come with a one-year limited warranty. All of the machines we tested come with this warranty, so it didn’t really factor into our overall decision-making process. The limited warranty doesn’t cover the ceramic crock or glass lid (companies will fix only manufacturer’s defects to the electronics for free).

Armed with this criteria, we scoured every review we could find and read up on more than 40 top-rated models. Not surprisingly, the most thorough reviews of slow cookers came from America’s Test Kitchen (subscription required) and Consumer Reports. Both had the clearest methodology and reviewed the most cookers.

From our research we found that programmable models in the $50 to $80 range fared just as well as, if not better than, pricier machines made by All-Clad, KitchenAid, and Cuisinart. The more expensive models tended to have a sleeker design, but not much beyond that.

For our original testing, in the spring of 2013, we tried the Crock-Pot 6.5-Quart Countdown Touchscreen Digital Slow Cooker and Hamilton Beach’s Set & Forget 6-Quart Programmable Slow Cooker with Spoon/Lid, which was highly recommended by both Pellman Good and O’Dea and emerged as our top pick.

The following year, Hamilton Beach introduced a new model of the Set & Forget (the 33969); we pitted it against the Crock-Pot 6-Quart Cook & Carry Digital Slow Cooker with Heat-Saver Stoneware, but the Set & Forget remained our winner.

Since then, a slow cooker not covered in our original guide has emerged as the number-one choice on Amazon.com: the Crock-Pot 6-Quart Programmable Cook & Carry Slow Cooker. And in the spring of 2015, Crock-Pot also released the first smart cooker, the 6-Quart Smart Slow Cooker with WeMo. We decided to test both of these against our top pick.

This low, moist heat helps dissolve connective tissues in tougher cuts of meat and breaks down fibrous vegetables and beans.
Earlier, we mentioned that a universal complaint about most modern slow cookers is that they run too hot, even on the low setting. Ideally, the cooking liquid should simmer between roughly 190 °F and somewhere below the boiling point of 212 °F (America’s Test Kitchen found this to be the best range). This low, moist heat helps dissolve connective tissues in tougher cuts of meat and breaks down fibrous vegetables and beans. Boiling is a sure path to stringy roasts and dried-out sauces.

To determine how hot each of the machines cooked, we filled each crock with 4 quarts of water and measured the temperature of the water every half hour on both the low and high settings. We then tested for hot spots by cooking a batch of beans in each machine, noting whether the beans cooked evenly and how much liquid evaporated over a span of six to eight hours. In our original test, we also cooked 4-pound rump roasts in the Hamilton Beach Set & Forget and the Crock-Pot Programmable Touchscreen. Most recently, we cooked 3-pound chuck roasts in the Set & Forget, the Crock-Pot Programmable Cook & Carry, and the Smart Slow Cooker.

Additionally, we judged whether the programmable timers were easy to use, whether the hardware felt sturdy, and if there were any quirks in the design that made the cookers difficult or impractical to use.

Our pick

Although the Hamilton Beach Set & Forget 6-Quart Programmable Slow Cooker isn’t the most luxurious or sleekest-looking machine out there, it does everything it should at a very modest price. It has the largest digital display of the models we tested, making it the easiest to read from across the kitchen, and its interface was the simplest to use. It cooks at true slow-cooking temperatures, unlike others we tried that ran too hot. Its locking lid also makes it more portable. We like that the Set & Forget has an alarm that rings at the start and the end of the cooking cycle–a helpful feature many newer, fancier cookers, like the others we tested, omit. Finally, the Set & Forget was the only slow cooker we found that included a temperature probe.

The Set & Forget’s digital interface wasn’t as modern-looking as the ones on the Smart Slow Cooker or the Cook & Carry. It was, however, easy to program and the easiest to read from a distance, with large letters and numbers telling you what temperature the machine is set to and how much cooking time is left. That’s especially true compared with the WeMo Cooker, which had no digital display at all, only a power button and lit-up words telling you whether its temperature was High, Low, or Warm—its timer can be viewed only through an app on your smartphone or tablet.

On the Set & Forget’s programmable setting, you simply enter a cooking time and temperature (low or high), and at the end of the cooking cycle the machine kicks over to the warming setting. If using the heat probe, the machine heats up until the meat has reached a specified temperature, then switches to the warming setting. The manual mode allows you to use the machine like an old-school cooker: Just turn it on and it stays on until you shut it off. We like how much flexibility this interface gives you.

In our tests, the Set & Forget consistently cooked at or just below a modest simmer—perfect for braising meats and vegetables. After six hours on the low setting, water heated to a steady 190 °F; after three hours on high it leveled off at 210°F. (The Cook & Carry and Smart Slow Cooker ran slightly hotter than the America’s Test Kitchen recommended high temperature of 212 °F, leveling off at 214 °F and 213 °F after four hours on high, respectively.)

The Set & Forget’s sturdy locking lid makes it great for travel, or even to safely move the full crock from one part of the kitchen to another. We also think this design will give you more peace of mind if you have small children or rowdy pets in the house. The Smart Slow Cooker, by comparison, doesn’t have a locking lid or gasket; we wouldn’t feel comfortable transporting it anywhere.