Have you ever had a kitchen experience that was so disastrous that you still recall it up to this date? What was it? For me, it was the time I put a hot lid upside down on my brand new glass top stove. I heard the glass crack, and can you imagine the horror? The stove was practically brand new and I had no idea that you should not place a hot lid facedown on it. This is why after this terrible accident, I paid more attention to safety in the kitchen, learned more about the proper usage of appliances and was very careful with them.
However, even with all that precaution, I still come across such incidents. A few days ago, I was going through my favorite kitchen stuff group on Facebook and I saw something that shocked me. There was one homeowner who had posted a picture of what appeared to be chili all over their stove. You couldn’t even see the surface; it was entirely covered in chili. She said that the chili was cooked in a crockpot on high for six hours. Since it was not yet fully cooked, she put it back on the stove for an additional hour. The crock had cooled off and when she went to put it in the fridge the bottom fell out and the chili spilled all over. I couldn’t even begin to think about how we would clean that up. I think if it was me, I would probably cry for five to six hours and then start thinking on how to clean the mess.
Where did things go wrong here? A lot of people commented on her post, and the consensus was clear: there is one thing that you should never, never do and that is to place a crockpot on the stove. But why is that?
Is it possible to place a crockpot on the stovetop?
No, you should never put a crockpot on the stovetop. Crockpots are slow cookers that use low heat to cook food for an extended period of time, and this is ideal for soups, stews, and chili. The crockpot’s ceramic insert is designed to be heated on low, steady heat of a slow cooker and not the high heat of a stovetop burner. Placing a crockpot on the stove is dangerous, and here is why:
Crockpots, or slow cookers, are constructed with ceramic crocks that can chip or break when exposed to drastic temperature changes or heat sources. If you put a ceramic insert on a stovetop, you are introducing it to a form of heat it was never intended to encounter. Stovetop burners, whether electric or gas, create a very focused heat source that can lead to the ceramic to heat up very quickly. This can cause cracks or even lead to the bottom of the crockpot cracking or breaking off as we saw on the infamous Facebook post.
