Slow cooking is a perfect cooking method for the holiday season. With everyone so busy, it’s easy to save yourself a bit of time by tossing some ingredients into the crock and setting it to cook for 6-10 hours. Hey, you can even cook while you sleep! And stews, soups, or large roasts are perfect comfort foods to warm you up during the cold weather. Even if you’re reading this during the summer, keep in mind that a BBQ pot luck is much more fun when there’s chili or baked beans!

Hamilton Beach has been making appliances for decades, and they have a very robust and diverse lineup of slow cookers. The sizes of these slow cookers range from a tiny 2-quarter, to an extra large 8-quarter. Within this size range they have a variety of features to consider. Today, we’re going to review the Hamilton Beach Model 33473 7-Quart Programmable Slow Cooker in Silver.

This was an interesting buy for me because this really was the only slow cooker available that claims to be able to make food as a 2, 4, or 6 quart capacity slow cooker. Actually, it was quite difficult acquiring this one. They sent the wrong slow cooker twice, and then Amazon was temporarily out of them so I had to get it second hand. That’s why you see the damage in the picture above.

But the cooker worked just as fine, and I tested a couple of recipes with different quart sizes to see how it performed. Everything worked quite well, and I actually selected this model to be my #3 pick in the 4-quart mid-price category, AKA small sized slow cookers with a mid-range budget. Though it actually has a six quart capacity, which makes it a bit larger compared to other four quart cookers, the versatility of being able to cook larger dishes was interesting.