For those cooler days, I turn to my Crock-Pot for easy, homey meals that make the house smell good all day while they cook. And the big bonus: They’re so easy to put together!
This slow cooker BBQ beef sandwich recipe requires all of 10 minutes to mix the sauce ingredients and then plop the meat in the middle. You can use straight barbecue sauce, but I like to make a few tweaks. See, one of the problems with slow cookers is that the flavors can become diluted over all that cooking time.
To add layers of spiciness (not heat, but flavor), I toss in a little vinegar for a bit of a North Carolina barbecue taste; then mustard, onion and garlic powders to round out the sauce. It’s also important to thin the barbecue sauce with water, or else it has a tendency to burn in the Crock-Pot. Each slow cooker seems to cook a bit differently, so you might want to peek at the sauce during the day just to make sure it doesn’t char.
Shredding the beef and then returning it to the slow cooker for a second cooking also gives you time to adjust the flavors. I add a bit of heat to the sauce with either a dash of cayenne pepper or Tabasco sauce. For creaminess, I toss in a tablespoon of butter during that second Crock-Pot trip, too.
After the ease of putting this together, maybe the next best thing about this recipe is that I usually have full tummies all around – and leftovers for me for lunch the next day. This recipe doubles easily, and you can even freeze extras.
