• Slow Cooker Recipes

How to Adapt Your Favorite Recipes for the Slow Cooker Without Messing Them Up

arianeJuly 28, 2025

Your favorite recipes can easily be adapted for slow cooker cooking. For example, you can convert your favorite stew recipe—or even a soup!—to a slow cooker version quite easily.

The simplest way to proceed is to find a similar recipe online or in a cookbook, but one that’s specifically made for a slow cooker. As a general rule, the amount of liquid used in a conventional cooking method can be reduced by 25 to 50% for successful slow cooker cooking. For soups, the amount of liquid will remain the same.

For example, if I have a chicken curry recipe that usually calls for 300 ml of coconut milk, and I want to adapt it for the slow cooker, I’ll search my cookbooks or the internet for one or two slow cooker chicken curry recipes. One might call for 250 ml of vegetable broth, another for 200 ml of coconut milk. So I’ll adjust my original recipe by keeping all the same ingredients, but I’ll reduce the coconut milk to somewhere between 200 and 250 ml (instead of the 300 ml I normally use).

The reason is that there’s very little evaporation in a slow cooker, as it’s a nearly airtight system. The steam stays trapped inside, condenses on the lid, and then drips back into the dish—keeping it very moist.

Another small tip: toward the end of cooking, check whether more liquid is needed and adjust accordingly.

You can adapt many of your recipes for the slow cooker. However, I recommend avoiding recipes that requires frying (like General Tao chicken) or grilling. Additionally, dairy products and pasta are usually added at the end of cooking process. 

You can even adapt dessert recipes—like cakes, banana bread, or brownies—for the slow cooker! Simply use your regular cake pans inside the slow cooker (just make sure the pan fits inside—your only constraint!).

To convert a dessert recipe for the slow cooker, you’ll need to pour boiling water around the cake pan until it reaches halfway up the sides.

As for cooking time, a larger cake will take between 3 to 5 hours, while smaller desserts like brownies will need about 2 hours. I also recommend using the low setting on your slow cooker for desserts. The low setting allows for slow, gentle cooking, which prevents the bottom of your cake from burning before the center is cooked. If you use the high setting, the dessert will heat up too quickly: you’ll end up with a hard crust on the edges while the center remains undercooked.