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For the home cook, its usually a better strategy to spend money up front on quality, but ignore specialized tools, than try to cheap out. Alton Brown's advice a

For the home cook, its usually a better strategy to spend money up front on quality, but ignore specialized tools, than try to cheap out. Alton Brown's advice about unitaskers is terrible, except for the first time you start cooking at home and don't know what you need. Someone could spend days looking for the specific slow cooker you found and maybe your onions from it are good. The idea of saving 50 dollars by buying an unglazed piece of quarry from Lowe's for 5 bucks instead of a proper pizza stone is a popular myth. Anyone who has actually tried it, has probably wasted hours on the internet looking for it and when the idea came out was most likely wasting tons of gas going to multiple Lowe's. Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks. Published recipes in a proper cookbook tend to be of higher quality, but its not always a guarantee. You get lucky every once in a while and find a hidden gem, but its almost never worth the effort to try non-established recipes as a beginner cook that can't read a recipe and immediately find red flags. I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating.

kstenerud 3y ago
Folks, just ignore this rude fellow. A slow cooker is essentially a low temperature heating element and a ceramic cooking vessel. The ceramic dissipates the low heat evenly even on the cheaper ones, and you get a result within tolerance so long as the regulator isn't crap. Just don't scratch up the glaze. Your optimal slow cooker will have decent insulation (saves on energy) and if you crave luxury, a timer so that you can set it to automatically turn off or switch to "keep warm" after x hours. You're also in luck because most people never use their slow cookers and eventually donate them to the local thrift shop, so you can pick them up super cheap to try out and decide if a slow cooker is for you. Once you've gotten a taste for slow cooked foods, you can start looking around for what tools will best serve your future culinary ambitions. And no, you don't need a Le Creuset; that's just for snobs who like to tell everyone that they have Le Creuset. It won't make better carmelized onions.
- Larrikin 3y ago
  Name the brand and model of your amazing 5 dollar slow cooker and give us some recipes to use in it. Or people could just read dozens of reviews of a hundred year cooking vessel where they always complain about the price but reluctantly admit its better. Spending lots of money on cooking supplies as a novice is fraught with landmines of people wasting money, but out right dismissals of spending any money is also usually a red flag of someone just discovering cooking. A college sophomore in their first apartment probably doesn't need a $300 dollar knife, but an adult with a job that spends the money on something nice will get years if not decades on a much safer and more efficient knife they will get used to with occasional whetstone sharpening.
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    The OP wrote: bought at a goodwill for $5 The person made no other claims about this slow cooker except caramelizing onions.
    - Larrikin 3y ago
      My point was >Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks. The 15 minute caramelized onions, the cheap slow cooker onions, and other such things are nearly always lies, despite how much I wish them to be true.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        I have used a number of different slow cooker brands over the years. Most were Crock-pot brand, but I've used others. I've never been able to tell the difference. Sure there are tools where brand matters, but in the case of a slow cooker I'm putting the burden back on you: find me any brand that is actually inferior or better than the others. I don't think you can. Non-slow-cooker things like a pressure cooker (ie instant-pot) with a slow cooker function are inferior to a real slower cooker, but they don't claim to be a slow cooker either.
genocidicbunny 3y ago
> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I can guarantee you that I can make caramelized onions that are better than pretty much anything you have ever had in your life, but it won't be because I have fancier tools. It will be because I'm using delicious homegrown onions that you can eat raw like apples, that you would be hard pressed to replicate. What's my point with that anecdote? Don't really have one, much like yours.
nvy 3y ago
I have a le creuset and cook with it often. I also have lots of cheap kitchen stuff. Specifically what aspect or quality of yours do you think makes better caramelized onions?
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  According to their other replies, the brand name.
dumpster_fire 3y ago
Reads like someone who doesn't cook, but went too deep down the YouTube product minmax research hole with America's Test Kitchen.
lelanthran 3y ago
> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating. From what you've said, I think you don't know the subject matter[1] well enough to talk authoritatively about it. [1] How slow cookers work, or cooking in general.
tourmalinetaco 3y ago
Did you seriously just call a slow cooker a “unitasker”? And no, your Le Creuset caramelized onions will taste no different than slow cooker caramelized onions. This is what we call in science a placebo.

kstenerud 3y ago

Folks, just ignore this rude fellow. A slow cooker is essentially a low temperature heating element and a ceramic cooking vessel. The ceramic dissipates the low heat evenly even on the cheaper ones, and you get a result within tolerance so long as the regulator isn't crap. Just don't scratch up the glaze. Your optimal slow cooker will have decent insulation (saves on energy) and if you crave luxury, a timer so that you can set it to automatically turn off or switch to "keep warm" after x hours. You're also in luck because most people never use their slow cookers and eventually donate them to the local thrift shop, so you can pick them up super cheap to try out and decide if a slow cooker is for you. Once you've gotten a taste for slow cooked foods, you can start looking around for what tools will best serve your future culinary ambitions. And no, you don't need a Le Creuset; that's just for snobs who like to tell everyone that they have Le Creuset. It won't make better carmelized onions.

Larrikin 3y ago
Name the brand and model of your amazing 5 dollar slow cooker and give us some recipes to use in it. Or people could just read dozens of reviews of a hundred year cooking vessel where they always complain about the price but reluctantly admit its better. Spending lots of money on cooking supplies as a novice is fraught with landmines of people wasting money, but out right dismissals of spending any money is also usually a red flag of someone just discovering cooking. A college sophomore in their first apartment probably doesn't need a $300 dollar knife, but an adult with a job that spends the money on something nice will get years if not decades on a much safer and more efficient knife they will get used to with occasional whetstone sharpening.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  The OP wrote: bought at a goodwill for $5 The person made no other claims about this slow cooker except caramelizing onions.
  - Larrikin 3y ago
    My point was >Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks. The 15 minute caramelized onions, the cheap slow cooker onions, and other such things are nearly always lies, despite how much I wish them to be true.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      I have used a number of different slow cooker brands over the years. Most were Crock-pot brand, but I've used others. I've never been able to tell the difference. Sure there are tools where brand matters, but in the case of a slow cooker I'm putting the burden back on you: find me any brand that is actually inferior or better than the others. I don't think you can. Non-slow-cooker things like a pressure cooker (ie instant-pot) with a slow cooker function are inferior to a real slower cooker, but they don't claim to be a slow cooker either.

genocidicbunny 3y ago

> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I can guarantee you that I can make caramelized onions that are better than pretty much anything you have ever had in your life, but it won't be because I have fancier tools. It will be because I'm using delicious homegrown onions that you can eat raw like apples, that you would be hard pressed to replicate. What's my point with that anecdote? Don't really have one, much like yours.

nvy 3y ago

I have a le creuset and cook with it often. I also have lots of cheap kitchen stuff. Specifically what aspect or quality of yours do you think makes better caramelized onions?

tourmalinetaco 3y ago
According to their other replies, the brand name.

dumpster_fire 3y ago

Reads like someone who doesn't cook, but went too deep down the YouTube product minmax research hole with America's Test Kitchen.

lelanthran 3y ago

> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating. From what you've said, I think you don't know the subject matter[1] well enough to talk authoritatively about it. [1] How slow cookers work, or cooking in general.

tourmalinetaco 3y ago

Did you seriously just call a slow cooker a “unitasker”? And no, your Le Creuset caramelized onions will taste no different than slow cooker caramelized onions. This is what we call in science a placebo.