10 Easy Slow-Cooker Recipes With 6 Ingredients or Fewer
Some slow-cooker recipes come with ingredient lists long enough to feel like a second grocery trip. These are the opposite. Each of these 10 recipes uses six ingredients or fewer.
That makes them especially handy when you want dinner with minimal measuring, chopping, and pantry hunting. Several also come with published cost breakdowns from Budget Bytes, while others lean heavily on convenient ingredients such as bottled sauce, frozen meatballs, canned vegetables, or seasoning packets.
Here are 10 low-ingredient slow-cooker ideas to keep on hand.
Mississippi Chicken
Five ingredients do the work in this tangy shredded chicken recipe. It combines 3 pounds of boneless chicken breasts with one 1-ounce packet of ranch seasoning, one 1-ounce packet of au jus seasoning, a stick of unsalted butter, and about eight pepperoncini.
Cook it on low for six hours or on high for three to four hours. The batch makes six servings, making it an easy option when you want enough chicken to feed several people without assembling a complicated ingredient list.
Budget Bytes prices the recipe at $10.44 per batch, or $1.74 per serving.
Slow-Cooker BBQ Chicken
Barbecue chicken can be refreshingly uncomplicated. This version uses about 1.3 pounds of boneless chicken breasts, an 18-ounce bottle of BBQ sauce, smoked paprika, garlic powder, salt, and pepper.
That’s six ingredients total. Cook the chicken on high for about 2½ hours or on low for four to five hours, then shred it.
Budget Bytes suggests using the finished chicken for sandwiches or baked potatoes. Just remember that buns and toppings are extras and aren’t included in the six-ingredient total. The published cost is $5.79 per batch, or $1.44 per serving.
Related: 7 Tips for Hosting a Successful Summer Barbecue or Cookout
Crock Pot Salsa Chicken
A jar of salsa gives you a major head start with this five-ingredient chicken recipe. Along with about 2 pounds of boneless chicken breasts and a 16-ounce jar of salsa, you need chili powder, garlic powder, and onion powder.
Cook for about 2½ hours on high or 5 hours on low. Once finished, use the chicken as a filling for tacos or bowls.
Tortillas, rice, and toppings aren’t included in the five-ingredient count, so the base recipe stays impressively simple. Budget Bytes lists the cost at $9.60 per batch and $1.60 per serving.
Slow-Cooker Cabbage and Sausage
For something more like a complete one-pot dinner, cabbage and sausage keeps the shopping list short while adding potatoes and vegetables to the cooker, too.
The six main ingredients are 1½ pounds of baby potatoes, one onion, half a cabbage, steak seasoning, 14 ounces of smoked sausage, and 2 cups of chicken broth. The source suggests kielbasa or andouille for the sausage.
Cook everything for four hours on high or eight hours on low. Budget Bytes prices the batch at $7.80, or $1.30 per serving, before an optional parsley garnish.
Five-Ingredient Pot Roast
Pot roast sounds like an all-day cooking project, but the ingredient list here is remarkably short.
The recipe uses 2 to 2½ pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes, a 1-pound bag of baby carrots, a 2- to 3-pound chuck roast, two 10.75-ounce cans of cream of chicken soup, and one packet of onion soup mix.
Cook it on low for eight to nine hours. After shredding the roast, the recipe calls for about another 20 minutes of cooking.
Related: 5 Healthy Spices to Keep in Your Kitchen: Simple Ingredients Worth Knowing
Root-Beer Pulled Pork
Root beer in pulled pork may sound unexpected, but it makes this one of the shortest ingredient lists here.
For the slow-cooked pork itself, you need just three things: a 2-pound pork tenderloin, 12 fluid ounces of root beer, and an 18-ounce bottle of BBQ sauce.
The recipe also lists eight buns for serving. Include those, and the sandwich version is still only four ingredients.
It’s a sweet-savory pulled-pork idea with very little measuring.
Grape-Jelly Meatballs
You only need three ingredients for this classic party-style slow-cooker appetizer: frozen cocktail meatballs, grape jelly, and chili sauce.
Because the recipe starts with prepared meatballs, you skip mixing, shaping, or browning homemade ones. That makes it especially useful when you want simple assembly rather than a lengthy cooking project.
Slow-Cooker Creamed Corn
This five-ingredient side dish starts with frozen corn kernels and keeps everything else equally familiar: an 8-ounce package of cream cheese, butter, milk, and sugar.
The original recipe specifies 1¼ 16-ounce packages of frozen corn.
It’s a hands-off side that could be especially convenient when your stovetop and oven are already busy with other dishes.
Slow-Cooker Sweet Potato Casserole
Holiday cooking often produces sprawling ingredient lists, but this sweet potato casserole keeps it to five.
The recipe calls for two 29-ounce cans of sweet potatoes, butter, white sugar, brown sugar, and milk. The canned sweet potatoes also keep the ingredient list pantry-friendly.
Chicken and Salsa
If five-ingredient salsa chicken still sounds too complicated, this separate whole-chicken recipe cuts the list to three.
You need one sweet onion, one whole chicken, and one jar of salsa. That’s it.
This is distinct from the boneless Crock Pot salsa chicken above, giving you another way to use the same basic salsa-plus-chicken idea with even fewer ingredients.
With ingredient counts ranging from three to six, these recipes show how little you may need to start a slow-cooker meal. Whether you want shredded chicken, pot roast, pulled pork, a party appetizer, or an easy side dish, the biggest convenience here may simply be having fewer things to remember at the grocery store.
