RobbsSlowCookerBook: Top 10 Dishes of 2024
Instead of the usual year-end round-up of my Top 10 Irish restaurant dishes, here’s a look back at the Top 10 recipes I tested in 2024 for Braised, Simmered and Stewed: Heritage Dishes for the Slow Cooker, my new cookbook.
Written in Ireland, edited in California, and inspired by slow-cooked dishes from all over the place, the book is due out from Chronicle Books in Autumn 2026.
Here’s the Top 10 list:
#10 Potaje de Garbanzos (Spain)
This hearty chickpea potage (or potaje as its known in Spanish) is thickened with a unique egg yolk, breadcrumb and garlic paste ground in a mortar. The finished bowls of soup are then garnished with the egg whites.
Talk about old-fashioned, this is a descendant from the Olla Podrida mentioned by Sancho Panza in Don Quixote which was published in the early 1600s.
#9 Green Chile Cheese Grits
I was visiting Austin this summer during the Hatch Green Chile season and happened to wander into an HEB supermarket while they were stocking fresh-roasted green chiles onto a display in the produce section. I bought some, of course. I also bought some Barton Mills stoneground grits at the Whole Foods Market.
When I got back to my AirBnb apartment, I simmered some stoneground grits in the slow cooker and when they were nearly ready, I added the chopped green chiles and some shredded Monterey Jack cheese.
What a nice breakfast, topped with a couple of fried eggs!
#8 Beef Bourguignon (Burgundy, France)
This charismatic beef stew is flavored with shoulder roast, bacon, red wine, carrots, onion, garlic, thyme, and mushrooms.
What kind of wine to use in the stew is a thorny question. An actual honest-to-god red Burgundy sells for more than all the other ingredients combined. But if you use some other red wine, is it really Beef Bourguignon?
#7 Congee (China)
The slow cooker is an awesome way to make congee, one of the world’s oldest dishes. The soupy rice porridge is the first solid food for Asian infants, the last food of the elderly, and what late-night revelers eat at 24 hour stands like Moo Tong Congee in Bangkok.
It’s a hangover cure as well.
In 2022, KFC introduced fried chicken congee in its Shanghai restaurants. KFC’s congee with hundred-year egg has been on the breakfast menu of its Chinese outlets for 20 years now and it’s become wildly popular.
In my recipe, rice is simmered in the slow cooker overnight with chicken stock and lots of ginger paste until it breaks down into porridge. You ladle it into individual bowls with condiments on the side. I like mine with soy sauce, green onions, chiles, and jammy eggs.
#6 Ricotta Meatballs (Italy)
There is a traditional Italian dish called “polpettine ricotta e spinaci,” in which you roll up balls of ricotta cheese with parmesan and spinach into meatless meatballs. But I’m not sure if this was the inspiration for the ground meat and ricotta meatballs which have become popular in the U.S. Whatever the source, these are delicious in red sauce with pasta. The meatballs remain soft even after a long simmer in the slow cooker.
#5 Salpicon (Mexico)
The cold beef brisket called Salpicon is simmered in a chile broth for 8 hours in the slow cooker, chilled in the fridge, shredded with two forks and marinated in a chipotle dressing. Its then served in a salad of raw vegetables with tortilla chips and guacamolee on the side. Its astonishingly refreshing on a hot summer day.
#4 Seafood Ramen (Japan)
The slow cooker is the perfect appliance for steeping dashi, the delicate seaweed broth that is the base for nearly every kind of ramen. (No, we are not talking about the little packages of instant noodles you pour boiling water over in a plastic cup.)
There are over 20 regional varieties of ramen in Japan, and food lovers are learning how to make them at home. Seafood ramen is one of the tastiest–and the slow cooker makes it easy.
#3 Mutton Monbazillac (Bergerac, France)
In the south of France, leg of lamb sauteed with onions and other aromatics with a splash of Armagnac and braised in the local sweet white wine is a heavenly take on roast mutton. And so easy to do in the slow cooker.
Monbazillac is my favorite dessert wine. Similar to a Sauternes, it’s produced in the village of Monbazillac on the left bank of the Dordogne river just across from the town of Bergerac.
#2 Cassoulet (Toulouse, France)
Food writers have been fetishizing cassoulet for most of a century. In a lovely essay on the subject, novelist, food historian, and Canadian academic Rachel Hope Cleves writes, “For Americans in love with French food, cassoulet holds an almost magical significance. It evokes an unattainable ideal.”\
The dish becomes a lot easier to make if you use a slow cooker. In fact, you can render the duck fat, confit the duck legs, and make the duck stock in slow cookers too. When you get to the actual bean dish itself, the slow cooker simmers the whole thing down into a ducky masterpiece.
#1 Poire a la Beaujolais
The 19th century recipe for this classic French dessert comes from the wine-growing region near Lyon. The original was simply pears cooked in wine and spices and called “pear compote.” The modern version is a lovely dessert that’s great for entertaining and a natural for the slow cooker.
