For Slow Cooker Meals Your Kids Will Actually Love, Follow This Flavor-Packed Tip

When your kids reject a home-cooked meal after barely a nibble, it's easy to brush it off as just their picky appetites or the vegetables you put in it. However, if you've spent hours assembling a slow cooker meal to be told "I don't like it," there could be just one missing flavor link that you've overlooked. Umami, commonly referred to as the fifth taste, is that deep savory flavor that foods like mushrooms, tomatoes, soy sauce, and aged cheese naturally contain. And umami is an important element in making a meal feel full, hearty, and delicious, even more so when it comes to slow cooker meals.

Why? Well, that's because in the slow cooker, the long cook time can cause flavors to mute down a little too much. It's a great time saver and it does a good job cooking down meat or tough vegetables, but the resulting texture and flavors can be a little lacking without building in umami at the start. Simple things like just stirring in some concentrated tomato paste in a pasta dish, a dash of soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce in a soup or stew, or even just salt spiked with umami-rich MSG in your curries can subtly enhance savoriness. It will result in a tastier slow cooker meal, a win for anyone whose kids turn their noses up at bland food come dinner time.

Let's be real, getting kids to eat more balanced veggie-heavy meals is never an easy task, but as a plant-based cook myself, umami was one of the first lessons I had to learn to get vegetables to taste incredible on their own. Without being able to rely on ingredients like meat for depth, I had to turn to things like caramelized onions, fried mushrooms, seaweed, nutritional yeast, miso, and bouillon concentrate — the latter being some of the umami-boosting ingredients I now always have at home and just can't cook without.

Once you add some umami-rich ingredients at the start, you'll find that all the other elements in the dish absorb that savoriness as the meal cooks. For veggies in particular, this makes them taste less like standalone components or a boring side dish, and instead infuses them all with richer flavors your children (and honestly, you) are more likely to enjoy. Luckily, this is exactly the type of approach that slow cookers are best suited for, because over a longer cooking period, vegetables as well as legumes, grains, or even meat, have ample time to soak up all the flavors of the surrounding broths, sauces, or seasonings. So by bulking that up with umami early on, you are really building a savory foundation for your meals. And just watch how quickly portions fly out the slow cooker once you've started thinking about building this flavor in earlier.