You might have already tried making a chicken stew recipe or something similar and, if you did, the odds are that you used a saucepan on the stove. This is the most common way of making chicken stew but you can use a dutch oven or a slow cooker for stew recipes too.

Dutch Oven Cooking Tips for Wonderful Stew

Dutch ovens, which are sometimes called casseroles, french ovens or stockpots, are very useful. They are thicker and heavier than stockpots and this means they are able to conduct heat more deeply and more effectively. You can make braised meals, pot roasts, and stews in a dutch oven. You can sear meat in it, on the stove, and then transfer the whole thing to the oven to finish cooking. Dutch ovens have high sides, making them good for deep-frying and you can boil pasta or rice in them too.

To make a stew in a dutch oven, you can brown the meat or poultry in batches in the dutch oven on the stove. Meat browns easily in a dutch oven and you can brown a lot more at once than if; you were using a smaller pan. You can continue the stew either on the stove or in the oven.

Cast iron is a good choice for a dutch oven but iron does react with some foods. Some dutch oven manufacturers put a layer of enamel on the iron and others preseason the pots by spraying oil into them and baking it on. It is possible to erode the preseasoning away, making enamel the best choice.

Crockpot Cooking Tips for Making Stew

Using a slow cooker, sometimes called a crockpot, is a great cooking method to use with stew recipes. If you want to make stew in a crockpot, it is quite straightforward. First, you have to brown the chicken or meat. Then you add the other ingredients, perhaps vegetables, bouillon, herbs, spices and potatoes, and leave it to cook over a medium heat for five or six hours or a low heat for about eight hours.

Crockpot stews are tender and flavorful, which is why this stew cooking method is so popular with a lot of people.

If you are out working all day, why not use a slow cooker for making your dinner? You might like your chicken stew spicy or mild but whichever type of stew you prefer, a crockpot is the ideal way to make sure your dinner is ready for you when you get home. It might only take an hour or two to make a stew in a normal pan but, when you are ready to eat, a slow cooker delivers the goods instantly.

A lot of people have discovered that slow cooker or crockpot stew recipes are easy to make, crockpots come with basic cooking tips, and instructions for use, making them simple to master, even for the novice cook. The beauty of a slow cooker is you can add your ingredients in the morning go off to work and come home to the smell of a wonderful home cooked meal and not have to do any work when your tired from a long hard day's works.