Safely Slow Cooking Frozen Meat

When I first got my slow cooker, the little pamphlet that was included with it warned against under cooking meat and the threat of bacteria growth! I have had my slow cooker for over a year now, and I lost that pamphlet a long time ago. So when the question of slow cooking frozen meat came up I checked the web. The internet has done an amazing job of keeping the slow cooker from going extinct. It has reunited hundreds of thousands of slow cooks from around the world to share recipes and advice. Popular demographics in the slow cooking community are military wives, Iowa, religious, and the facebook group SLOW COOKER RECIPES is mostly women from the Maritimes, particularly Newfoundland. There is a lot of conflicting advice about whether it is safe to slow cook frozen meat, specifically if the required temperatures are reached to prevent food poisoning. What I read on the official Crock Pot brand web page has settled this debate once and for all, that it is safe to slow cook frozen meat:

"You can cook frozen meats in your Crock-Pot® slow cooker, however it is best to use the following guidelines:

• Add at least 1 cup of warm liquid to the stoneware before placing meat in the stoneware.
• Do not preheat the slow cooker.
• Cook recipes containing frozen meats for an additional 4 to 6 hours on Low, or an additional
  2 hours on High."

Very reassuring coming from an official manufacturer. If you have doubts, read the required temperatures, and use a meat thermometre to verify that it is hot enough. I need to ask for one for my birthday, but this solves it for me. Great news because when you keep the heat to a minimum in the winter to save on your gas bill, it's tough to defrost your feet in the morning let alone a three pound roast.

And it was a real cold winter in our poorly insulated Montreal apartment. If our back stoop wasn't home to the occasional H addict or lusty teenagers we could have seriously expanded our frozen food section.

The Crock Pot web page was also useful in pointing out that the term Crock Pot is a trademarked name, like Kleenex. I think slow cooker is what many Canadians call it, and I'm kind of proud we've been referring to the none sponsored name.