How a slow cooker can reduce your grocery bill in Australia

Slow cookers turn cheap ingredients into good food

A slow cooker — sometimes called a Crock-Pot — uses low, steady heat over several hours to cook food. This process is particularly good at transforming inexpensive, tough cuts of meat into tender, flavourful meals. It is also well suited to soups, stews, legume dishes and grains that benefit from long cooking times.

For households trying to reduce grocery costs, a slow cooker opens up a range of cheap ingredients that are difficult or time-consuming to cook otherwise.

The meat difference

The cheapest cuts of beef, lamb and pork — chuck steak, blade, osso bucco, lamb shanks, pork shoulder — are tough because they come from muscles that do heavy work. They are also richly flavoured and high in collagen, which breaks down into gelatin during long, slow cooking, producing a deeply satisfying result.

These cuts are regularly available at around half the price per kilogram of premium cuts like scotch fillet, lamb backstrap or pork loin. In a slow cooker over six to eight hours, they become genuinely excellent — braised beef cheeks, pulled pork, slow-cooked lamb shoulder, hearty beef stew.

Compare prices for these cheaper cuts at your local supermarket or butcher. Our butcher vs supermarket guide covers where you are likely to find the best prices on different cuts.

Legumes and dried beans

Dried legumes — chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils, split peas — are among the cheapest protein sources available and are perfectly suited to slow cooking. A bag of dried chickpeas costing a couple of dollars will produce enough cooked chickpeas to fill multiple meals — significantly cheaper than canned equivalents.

Adding legumes to meat-based slow cooker meals stretches the recipe further per serve, reducing the overall cost per portion. A beef and chickpea stew uses less meat per serve than a pure meat stew while remaining filling and nutritious.

Batch cooking built in

A slow cooker typically produces four to eight serves — more than a single meal for most households. This surplus becomes lunch the next day, or a portion that goes directly into the freezer for a later week. Running the slow cooker once provides multiple meals.

For households that struggle to find time to cook on weeknights, the slow cooker addresses this directly: prepare the ingredients in the morning, turn it on, and a meal is ready by dinner without any further work. Our meal planning guide covers how to build slow cooker batches into a weekly routine.

What to cook that is genuinely cheap

Good starting points for cost-effective slow cooker meals:

• Beef and vegetable soup. Blade or chuck steak, root vegetables, canned tomatoes, stock. Four to six serves for a few dollars per serve.
• Pulled pork. Pork shoulder is one of the cheapest cuts available. Slow-cooked with basic spices, it produces enough meat for multiple meals — served in wraps, on rice, in tacos.
• Lentil and vegetable dahl or soup. Entirely plant-based, extremely cheap per serve, and genuinely filling.
• Chicken drumstick curry. Drumsticks are consistently among the cheapest chicken cuts. They work well in a slow cooker curry sauce with canned tomatoes and spices.

Running costs

A slow cooker uses around 100 to 300 watts — considerably less electricity than an oven. Running a slow cooker for eight hours costs roughly 20 to 60 cents in electricity at current Australian energy rates, depending on the model and your tariff. This is less than running a conventional oven for a one-hour roast.