Can you double slow cooker recipes?

When you are doing slow cooker recipes - especially favorites that you might want to double up in order to freeze the extras for your freezer cooking - but can you safely double your slow cooker recipes?

Unfortunately, you cannot easily double slow cooker recipes like you can most other recipes, unless you are cooking them in single batches using multiple slow cookers, you cannot double up recipes.

All slow cooker recipes, especially those that contain meat, are calculatged precisely to ensure the meat is cooked to a safe temperature. When the recipe is doubled, it takes significantly longer for the ingredients to reach the safe cooking temperature, which means that it might not cook long enough to kill any unsafe bacteria in raw meat, such as beef and chicken, which is normally killed when it reaches cooking temperature for a period of time.

When you do try doubling a recipe, usually there is too much liquid in the end product once it is finished cooking. You can try experimenting by doubling the solid ingredients but only adding half the liquid. It is easier to add more liquid later in the cooking than it is to try and compensate for too much.