Tower T16018 Stainless Steel Slow Cooker with 3 Heat Settings, Keep Warm Function, Tempered Glass Lid, Removable Ceramic Pot, 3.5 Litre, 210 W, Silver

Product Information

Cook a range of delicious family dishes such as casseroles and soups, with the large 3.5 litre capacity providing enough space to serve up to 5 portions

Some slow cookers will automatically shift to this mode after a programme has ended, while others require switching manually.

Slow cookers range in capacity, from a compact 1.5 litres up to 7 litres. As a general guide, a 1.5 to 2.3-litre capacity is great for two people, a larger 4 to 4.5 litres will feed four, and 5.5 to 7 litres is ideal for four to six people. The Ninja Foodi Multi-Cooker is certainly mighty, but if you like your gadgets it could be a great investment. You can of course just use this multi-cooker as a slow cooker, for which it has a generous 6 litre capacity, but you can also take advantage of the sear setting to brown meat and veggies before slow cooking for a more rich flavour.

The controls tend to be similar on most slow cookers with a ‘low’ setting for longer, slower cooking throughout the day and a ‘high’ setting for faster cooking with similar slow-cooked results. Cook a range of delicious family dishes such as casseroles and soups, with the large 3.5 litre capacity providing enough space to serve up to four portions

Tower 3.5L Cavaletto Slow Cooker: design and style

When testing these slow cookers we were keen to try out each of their main cooking settings, so while a more simple manual slow cooker was used to make a stew or simple curry, we pressure cooked meat and steamed fish in the more complex slow cookers on the market. When slow cookers came with digital settings we attempted delay-start recipes and tested how easy they were to use. Related: The best food processor for blending, chopping and dicing Cooking in the Tower 3.5L Cavaletto Slow Cooker: how easy is it to use? The first thing you need to consider with any slow cooker is its capacity – each will list its bowl size in litres. Bear in mind that this won’t translate to the same amount of food, as you shouldn’t fill slow cookers to the brim. This gap allows your food to bubble and simmer properly. The usable cooking space will be around three-quarters of its bowl size, for example, a five-litre cooker can accommodate around four litres of food. I have had a slow cooker for over 24 years ( a Tower 3 litre). Still going strong. But decided on this as an addition as have found the 3 litre capactiy often insufficient. So opted for this 6.5 litre monster! I often like to cook bigger batches and freeze some. But I will still keep the smaller one for smaller batches!

This function starts your cooking off on a high setting before automatically reducing the temperature to the low setting for the remainder of the cooking time.An increasingly popular way of cooking, sous-vide is a French term that simply means ‘under vacuum’. You place your food inside a sealed pouch and then pop it into a temperature-controlled water bath to cook. You can activate a keep warm setting to keep your food ready for as long as six hours after your cooking mode has finished. The sear mode took only a few minutes to pre-heat and we were able to brown our onions before adding curry ingredients, which delivered a lot of extra flavour.The slow cooker's 'reduce' function was useful for bubbling away excess liquid after slow cooking. As for the machine. It seems of decent quality. I wanted a simple on/off type mainly from experience. There is little need for a timer/delay etc with a slow cooker. And probably will prove to be more reliable in the long run! Slow cookers are also brilliant for less-than-confident cooks, easily creating all those meals that seem a bit scary on the hob. That’s because slow cooking develops the flavours of food for richer, tastier results. It’s not just dinners that slow cookers excel at making either. They make great porridge, granola, stewed apples, bread and butter pudding, fudge and dips. You can use your slow cooker to melt chocolate, as a Bain-marie. How much should I spend on a slow cooker? The only downside I found with the design was that the base material was quite tinny and thin, which made it feel a bit flimsier than other slow cookers I've tested. That said, this means it's pleasingly light, so it's easy to manoeuvre around the kitchen, even when it has the ceramic pot inside.