Add A Stick Of Butter To Beef & Potatoes For An Easy Crockpot Comfort Meal

Crockpots make whipping up comfort meals extremely easy and affordable, making large quantities with no more effort than just tossing ingredients in and letting them cook. But if you're looking for something exceptionally simple, flavorful, and affordable, all you need is beef, potatoes, a stick of butter, and your choice of seasoning.

You never need to put expensive meat in your slow cooker thanks to its ability to render even the cheapest cuts into tender, fall-apart perfection, but the butter only helps this process. Even though a decent amount of fat and moisture will be absorbed by the potatoes, there will still be plenty to hydrate even the leanest, toughest meats. Crockpots are also great at preserving moisture, so selecting a decent-quality protein will produce enough juice to mix with the butter and make a pseudo gravy. All you need to do is drop a full stick of butter on top of your seasoned beef and potatoes and let the whole thing simmer for a while.

By keeping the seasonings simple and straightforward, you maintain the ease of this recipe. Still, taking some inspiration from other three-ingredient slow cooker recipes, like using dried onion soup mixes, keeps you from having to choose between flavor and effort. Beef, potatoes, and butter are pretty versatile and work with most anything, so don't be afraid to just use whatever you have on hand rather than shopping for something high-end or complex.

This recipe should already have the protein, vegetable, fat, and seasoning you need for a comprehensive meal, but you can still find little ways to improve the ingredients rather than adding new ones. Keeping things similar in size and using little tricks to maximize their flavor can go a long way towards maximizing the comforting hominess of this dish.

There's nothing worse than letting a crockpot simmer for hours only to find that not everything has cooked through all the way. That's why it's a generally good idea to try to keep everything roughly the same size. This is less important for the meat, although you may still want to divide a whole uncut roast into thirds, but it can be critical for veggies. Root vegetables and tubers, in particular, tend to vary in size quite a bit, but slicing and trimming them to a similar size ensures they'll all cook at the same speed. Similarly, thaw any frozen meat before you put it in your crock pot to ensure even (and safe) cooking throughout.

Regardless of what type of beef you end up using, always remember that searing meat first is a game changer for slow cookers. This infuses the liquid and other ingredients with that savory, umami-rich Maillard flavoring you get from roasted protein. Small pieces, like pre-cut stew meat, just need to fry in a pan for a few minutes before adding them in. Larger slabs like roasts benefit from a quick seasoning of salt and pepper and careful, even searing on all sides that might take a bit longer, but is seriously worth it.