Slow cookers tend to leach meat of its colour, so it’s important for appearance and flavour that they are well browned to start with. litre capacity means there’s ample room to cook plentiful and tasty meals, and its intuitive design makes the dinnertime experience easy. There are two shapes, the round and tall, which has less of a footprint, and the oval, which takes up more room but can be more versatile.

Our experts at the GHI make a beef stew, chicken curry and vegetable soup in every slow cooker we test, using both their high and low settings. The toughened glass lid means you can view the cooking process without letting heat escape, and the removable ceramic pot is an ideal serving dish.

It’s a modest option owing to the three simple settings: low, high and keep warm, but it gets the basics right.

The slow cooker will work its magic throughout the day or night, making it ready to serve when you’re ready to eat. With features like adjustable cooking times, preset functions, including a keep warm function, and a range of cooking temperatures, you're in complete control of your kitchen. Ideal for soups, stews, casseroles, desserts and more, this fun chalkboard slow cooker allows you to jot down ingredients, recipes and fun messages for the family. The last thing you want is to be lifting the lid every now and then to check progress, as heat and steam will quickly escape and add to your cooking time. An increasingly popular way of cooking, sous-vide is a French term that simply means ‘under vacuum’.

So we settled on the convenient and highly-rated Cuisinart Cook Central and the appliance served us well for years, until the coating was scratched. Hannah is our homes editor, specialising in reviewing the latest kitchen appliances, cleaning products, mattresses and bedding, and crafting equipment. The beef stew we made lost a little moisture but tasted flavoursome, while our chicken curry had deliciously moist meat that was falling off the bone. We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic.