Took me 2 hours to figure out why my $8 pot of beans came out crunchy
I soaked a pound of dried pinto beans overnight, threw them in my slow cooker Tuesday morning with onion and a ham hock, and they were still hard as rocks at dinner time. I kept adding hot water and cranking the heat, thinking it was a liquid problem, until my neighbor told me my 15 year old cooker just runs too cool to ever soften beans. How do you all check if a thrifted slow cooker actually gets hot enough before you trust it with a whole batch?