Crockpot Spaghetti Recipe with Ground Beef
A richly flavourful spaghetti sauce recipe in the crockpot, plus science-based cooking secrets to making the best sauce ever in your slow cooker.
Servings: 8
Ingredients
- ¼ cup olive oil
- 1 large onion finely chopped
- 2-3 tsp kosher salt divided use
- 4 cloves garlic
- 1 lb ground beef
- 1 6-oz can tomato paste
- 1 finely-diced medium eggplant optional
- 1 28-oz can unsalted crushed or diced tomatoes
Instructions
- Heat oil on sear setting in crockpot and add onion plus 1 tsp of salt. Cook until onion starts to soften, stir in garlic. Cook 2 minutes more until garlic smells fragrant.
- Add beef, breaking it up into chunks with a spoon, and season with another 1/2 tsp of salt. Cook until well browned (this step can take a while, you can skip it if short on time, but it does add a lot of flavour).
- Stir in tomato paste to evenly coat everything and cook until it the paste turns a shade darker and smells toasty, about 5 minutes. Stir in eggplant (if using), canned tomatoes and salt (if using eggplant, add 1 1/2 tsp more salt, if skipping it, add only 1/2 tsp).
- Close crockpot lid and cook on high setting for 4 hours or on low setting for 6 hours (longer cooking is perfectly fine if you've got more time!).
- Taste sauce and add more salt by small pinches as needed until it tastes bright and flavourful.
Notes
If you use salted canned tomatoes instead, reduce the salt to 2 tsp total.
Nutrition
Calories: 280kcal | Carbohydrates: 17g | Protein: 13g | Fat: 19g | Saturated Fat: 5g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 1g | Monounsaturated Fat: 10g | Trans Fat: 1g | Cholesterol: 40mg | Sodium: 953mg | Potassium: 863mg | Fiber: 5g | Sugar: 10g | Vitamin A: 613IU | Vitamin C: 18mg | Calcium: 66mg | Iron: 3mg