Forget The Stove: Make Your Next Italian Sauce This Way For Easier Weeknight Meals

Do you love making rich and hearty meals like spaghetti with meatballs and pasta primavera, but never have the time to prepare multi-step recipes on busy weeknights? Fortunately, if you can think ahead and carve out some time to prepare a portion of your ingredients in advance, you can start making more than one flavorful, full-bodied pasta sauce with the help of your slow cooker. With a little bit of strategic planning, your slow cooker can make award-worthy Italian meals any night of the week.

Specifically, when it comes to building delicious Italian sauces to pair with rice or pasta, the trick is often slow-cooking these recipes to build layers of complex flavor. Simply choose sauces that come with a small margin of error, like tomato or veggie-based options. You can also make recipes that include meat as a primary ingredient since your slow cooker can effectively break down any tough fibers.

In order to use your Crock-Pot like a pro, first cook your meat over your stove to develop its inherent flavor. To adapt your basic weeknight Bolognes recipe, first saute your veggies and brown your beef over your stove. You can also sear meats like sausage and pork ribs, then put them in the slow cooker to soften with all of your other sauce-specific ingredients.

Tomato sauces tend to work well in slow cookers because they mimic those all-day recipes that typically simmer in large Dutch ovens over your stove. Not to mention, the combination of proteins and sugars plus pre-sauteed vegetables increases flavor to create more satisfying well-rounded concoctions. However, not all Italian sauces produce the same epic crock pot results as those based around tomatoes, vegetables, and stock.

For one thing, pasta carbonara is too finicky to make in a slow cooker because the emulsification process is hard to replicate. You can still slow-cook certain types of dairy-rich sauces, like ultra creamy chicken fettuccine Alfredo, but the preparation of this dish takes a little extra finesse. Sauces that contain more complex ingredients like heavy cream (and even cream cheese) require you to pay closer attention to the cook times for best results. More often than not, you're better off adding cream to slow-cooked sauces within the last 20 to 30 minutes of cooking.

Keep in mind, if you're hoping to leave cream-based sauces in your slow cooker for 6 or more hours, their resulting texture runs the risk of turning lumpy or curdled. Since many dairy products are unpredictable under prolonged periods of heat, you're better off sticking to sauces that are definitively guaranteed to taste better with extra cooking time, like marinara or ragù.