You can make beef and broccoli, noodle dishes, and more in your slow cooker. Anton Chernoff/Shutterstock
From curries to noodle dishes, these Asian and Asian American dishes can be made in a slow cooker.
Beef and broccoli is a popular dish that requires just a few ingredients.
Chef Hugh Acheson recommends making Thai Chicken Soup in your slow cooker.
From take-out classics to traditional dishes, Asian-inspired slow cooker meals make dinner prep a breeze.
Asian and Asian American cuisines are extremely popular in the United States, with a 2023 report from the Pew Research Center finding that about 73% of U.S. counties have at least one Asian restaurant. Among Asian restaurants, Chinese restaurants are by far the most popular, followed by Japanese and Thai restaurants, according to the report.
But while eating out at these restaurants is a great way to support local businesses, you can also use your slow cooker to make some popular Asian and Asian American dishes at home.
Here are 12 slow cooker recipes you can set and forget.
There are plenty of recipes for American Chinese food like General Tso’s Chicken.
General Tso’s chicken and rice. Erin McDowell/Business Insider
Although General Tso’s chicken is far from traditional Chinese cuisine, it is still a popular item on American Chinese menus.
To make it at home, Life Made Sweeter recommends coating chunks of chicken breast in cornstarch, pan-frying them, and then tossing them in a slow cooker with their homemade General Tso’s chicken sauce.
Beef and broccoli is another popular American-Chinese dish that can be made in a slow cooker.
Beef and broccoli. Ruslan Mitin/Shutterstock
This takeout classic is packed with flavor, and making it in your slow cooker makes it easy to prepare. and It makes cleanup a lot easier: this recipe is truly a “set it and forget it” dish, meaning you just put all the ingredients in the slow cooker first and wait for it to finish cooking.
Here’s Life Made Sweeter’s recipe for making this popular dish at home: Boneless beef chuck roastand add the cornstarch sauce 15-25 minutes before cooking is done to thicken the sauce even more.
Porridge is another hearty dish you can make in a slow cooker.
Porridge. Enjoy life/Shutterstock
After a long day at work, few things are as comforting as a bowl of porridge (a kind of Chinese congee) made in a slow cooker.
Cook Simply shared a recipe for the slow-simmered congee, made with jasmine rice, ginger, chicken stock, garlic, soy sauce and spring onions, and topped with peanuts and a soft-boiled egg.
Orange chicken is a popular American-Chinese dish that can be made with just a few ingredients.
Orange chicken. Alexander Prokopenko/Shutterstock
Paired with steamed white rice, this hearty dish is sure to please everyone, and it’s easy to make in your slow cooker.
One recipe from Life Made Sweeter recommends cutting chicken breasts into 1-inch cubes, baking them, then tossing them in a slow cooker with a sauce made from ingredients like coconut aminos, orange juice, apple cider vinegar, and fish sauce.
Made with flank steak, garlic, ginger, brown sugar and soy sauce, Mongolian Beef is the perfect weeknight meal.
Mongolian beef. Tatiana Volgutova/Shutterstock
Although this American-Chinese dish does not originate in Mongolia, it is a favorite in many households.
Featuring savory flavors of soy sauce, ginger, red peppers, garlic, and sesame seeds, this Mongolian beef recipe will satisfy your American-Chinese food cravings.
You can also make a traditional curry in a slow cooker or crockpot.
Massa Man curry. Regret/Shutterstock
From yellow curry to a hearty, nutty massaman curry with beef and potatoes, like this recipe from Cook Simply, you can use your slow cooker to make soups and stews you’ll love.
Thai Coconut Chicken Soup, also known as Tom Kha Gai, is a chef-approved dish you can make in your slow cooker.
“This simple soup made with Thai chili peppers, coconut milk, and lime is just delicious,” celebrity chef Hugh Acheson told Business Insider about his favorite comfort food recipes made in the slow cooker.
You can find a recipe for Acheson’s Slow Cooker Chicken Soup with Chili, Coconut Milk and Lime at Garden & Gun, but America’s Test Kitchen also has a recipe for this fresh tasting soup.
Slow Cooked Asian BBQ Wings are sticky and flavorful chicken wings.
Asian style barbecue chicken wings. Zoo Kamiloff/Shutterstock
We all know that a slow cooker can make tender chicken wings, but adding an Asian BBQ-inspired sauce can also add some heat.
This recipe from Marion’s Kitchen takes 3 hours to make but only 10 minutes to prep, and uses delicious ingredients like sweet chili sauce, honey, and dark sweet soy sauce to create the perfect sauce for the wings.
She also recommends topping the wings with her homemade chili lime flakes, which she calls “grown-up sprinkles.”
Thai or Korean style short ribs become super tender in the slow cooker.
Thai style short ribs. Image Party/Shutterstock
Cookbook author Kim Laidlaw previously told Business Insider that short ribs are one of her favorite comfort meals to make in the crockpot, and they’re easy to adapt for an Asian twist.
One of the most popular recipe bloggers, Half Baked Harvest, has a recipe for Crockpot Thai Short Ribs with Coconut Rice that uses bone-in beef short ribs, Chinese five spice, pomegranate juice, and Thai chili sauce to create a flavorful dinner in just three hours.
Korean Bapsang, a cooking blog run by a Korean-American mother of two, also has a recipe for kalbi jjim (Korean braised short ribs) made in a slow cooker using Korean pears, daikon radishes, and shiitake mushrooms.
You can customize your ramen by adding your favorite toppings to the slow-cooked ramen.
Ramen bowl with soup, egg, and roasted pork. Yuga Kurita/Getty Images
You might think there’s no way you could make fancy ramen in a slow cooker, but you’d be wrong: One recipe for slow-cooked chicken ramen uses the crockpot as a base to cook the meat and broth, then adds the noodles later.
The slow-simmered ramen can be topped with ingredients like soft-boiled eggs, sesame seeds, green onions, chili oil, and pulled pork to enhance the flavor.
Vietnamese pho can also be made in a slow cooker.
Beef pho soup. Liv Gaunt/Shutterstock
Pho is a traditional Vietnamese dish that is similar to ramen in that they are both noodle soups, although pho usually uses rice noodles and has a distinctly different flavour profile.
Slow Cooker Pho Recipe Chef and registered dietitian Tessa Nguyen Applications Make the soup by adding chuck roast, five-spice powder, fish sauce, salt, water, and chopped green onions.
Or use your slow cooker to create tender pulled pork for banh mi sandwiches.
Banh mi sandwiches on a wooden board. Julie Deshaies/Shutterstock
Banh mi is one of the most popular Vietnamese sandwiches, usually made with pâté, a bright crunchy vegetable slaw, fish sauce, and sliced jalapeños or fresh coriander.
But another popular way to make a banh mi sandwich is with pulled pork, which can be easily made in a slow cooker.
One recipe from Delightful Plate, a cooking blog that specializes in authentic Vietnamese recipes, suggests slow-cooking pork shoulder over low heat for eight hours while simultaneously picking your own veggies for the sandwich.