This Is Exactly When To Add Spinach To Your Slow Cooker To Avoid A Mushy Mess

Popeye the sailor was onto something — spinach is a powerhouse of nutrients. This versatile leafy green is a good source of iron, calcium, vitamin K, and vitamin C, which are helpful for immunity, bone health, and eyesight. Unfortunately, the leaves can be a bit finicky to cook with. When cooking spinach in a slow cooker, you can quickly end up with a watery, dark mush. In other words, it's incredibly easy to overcook. Spinach loses a lot of volume as it cooks down; that's why we start with a heap of raw spinach and end with a significantly smaller cooked portion. Along with the volume, the texture and color of spinach changes during cooking as well — the longer you cook it, the softer and darker it becomes. What this means for your slow-cooking ventures is that you should be adding the spinach to your dish during the final 30 minutes of cooking for the best result.

Adding the spinach to the slow cooker towards the end of the cooking process ensures that the texture doesn't become too soft and the color stays a nice, vibrant, appetizing green. If you're cooking the meal on a high temperature setting, you can add in the spinach even later — 10 minutes before the finish. Or simply fold it in when the meal is cooked and allow the heat of the other food to only slightly cook it down, like in this slow cooker minestrone soup.

Spinach is over 90% water, so a lot of moisture gets released during the cooking process. Be mindful of your liquid content if you're planning to use spinach in your slow cooker dish. It's a lot easier for spinach to overcook if it's swimming in extra water, especially since the liquid can't evaporate because the lid stops the steam from escaping. If you add too much water at the beginning, you'll end up with a mushy mess after you add in the spinach. Just enough water to cover the initial ingredients is usually the perfect amount.

What about frozen spinach? While there are many creative uses for frozen spinach, putting it in a slow cooker is not one of them. First, it would need extra time to cook and would release even more moisture into your dish. More importantly, the USDA warns that frozen food takes a significantly longer time to reach a safe temperature inside the slow cooker, and it can also lower the overall temperature of the other ingredients. This can put you at a higher risk of food poisoning, so just stick to fresh or thawed spinach when using the slow cooker. You can, however, chop it into smaller pieces before adding it in for a more bite-friendly texture.