for self taught crockpot experts:
I am wondering about this because I want the collagen and fat on the inside of my pieces of meat (either chuck or bottom rump roast or lamb leg) to melt as I cook it, but I don't want it to dry out (especially in the case of lamb which does not have as much fat and collagen in certain pieces). So I am wondering lets say I am cooking lamb leg and my piece looks pretty bright red (muscle) thin rare stripes (collagen) and some layers of collagen on the top that are thick looking about 1/2 mm thick. So I want it to get really soft because I like all my meat very soft to chew (because of a poor digestion). My goals are then to make it soft, but also I want the collagen/fat inside it (even if its only a little) to melt before the water I add starts to boil it. So I do not want to add a lot of water then (i am guessing). But I want to add water (at least a little) because otherwise the meat may start to go dry. Another option might be to cut it up into small pieces and add lots of oil so that all the pieces are covered in oil. That way the water inside the pieces does not evaporate, so they become insulated allowing them to slow-cook without any water evaporating making them dry out. But lets stay I stick with my first idea of adding some water but not a lot in order to keep the meat moist so that it does not go dry. But yet i have to think about the best way to cook the muscle/fat parts of it. I feel like they get softer faster if they do not boil but rather are allowed to melt. One thought I had is that "wait a minute since the collagen/fat is mostly on the inside of the meat, where i can't even see it, then it is insulated from the water, so it will not be boiling completely. It will only be boiling where the water I add, touches the meat, essentially. Thus the collagen and fat on the inside of the meat will melt as the water around the meat heats up. So maybe then I do not have to even worry about the collagen and fat in the meat/on the surface of it boiling instead of having time to melt down. And this is even more applicable if I do not cut the roast into many pieces, but rather slow-cook it as one whole, because of the fact that less surface area of the meat is exposed to the boiling water.
One time I made beef soup and I got the meat to be really soft and tasty actually even though a few of the meat pieces had some collagen that stayed a bit hard/did not melt so I had to throw them out (because of poor digestion of hard foods even if tiny/all broken down with my teeth). Because they got so soft, I hope/wonder if then the water alone/moisture was able to cook them so well, and that the collagen/fat being boiled did not interfere with them getting soft, rather than being able to melt, as it would in a slow cooker with no water added.
So today is the first time i'm trying out cooking lamb leg by the method of slow cooker with chicken soup added to cover up half the lamb leg and carrots layered on the bottom of the crockpot in order to stop the bottom of the lamb from being burned by the crockpot.
What are your thoughts on how to let the fat/collagen in lamb melt, but because lamb does not have as much fat and collagen as lets say pork rump roast, and thus the fat in lamb, once melted, is not enough to keep it all insulated and thus no water to evaporate from it making it dry, how much cups of water should I add to the lamb leg roast in my crockpot to prevent it from drying? And how much water to add so as to not submerge too much collagen in water such that it can melt as much as possible in the lamb (mostly for flavoring purposes since fat makes things taste better so I want it to melt as much as possible inside the lamb).
Please only reply if you can cook a good lamb roast with my specifications in mind (extremely soft result).
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