You are looking for what is called a bouquet garni which is essentially a bundle of herbs tied together for easy removal.
There are three basic ways to do it:
- For herbs like thyme or sage which are on twigs, simply tie together the twigs with some food-safe string.
- Wrap the bundle of herbs in cheese cloth, and and tie together
- Use a tea ball type device to hold the herbs.
When the dish is done cooking, you can then remove the herbs all in one go simply by removing the bouqet garni.
Try cooking on low instead of warm (or at a higher temperature, maybe 185-195F, with your fancy crock pot), and make sure you really got good stew meat.
I would expect the beef to have been reasonably tender after that long if it were the right kind of cut - certainly not inedibly tough, even if it weren't all the way done due to the lower temperature. But it's unfortunately possible that the beef for stew that you got isn't actually good for this purpose; sometimes stores will sell things under that label expecting (I guess) that people will cook them briefly in their stew. Make sure that what you buy has a lot of connective tissue that will break down as it cooks. See also What is the best cut of beef to use for stews?
If you did have a good cut of beef for long slow cooking, it's possible that 160F is still just too low (or that 11 hours isn't long enough) for the meat you got. See What is the lowest possible temperature for stewing meat? - apparently the collagen -> gelatin breakdown can happen even down to 130F, but it's much faster at higher temperatures.
It's likely that one way or another the low temperatures also messed with your vegetables. I'm not sure if that's actually hot enough to soften them. And for some vegetables, cooking them at a lower temperature for a while will cause them to stay firm even if they're subsequently cooked at a higher temperature!
There's a blurb about this in On Food and Cooking, which I'll find and add into my answer when I can. In the meantime, I found this in a Serious Eats article about carrots:
Unlike meat proteins which are fully cooked anywhere between 140 and 165°F or so, vegetables contain pectin—a kind of glue that holds its cells together and keeps it firm. Pectin doesn't break down until 183°F, which means that no matter what vegetable you cook sous-vide, you have to set your water oven to at least 183°F if you would like the end results to be tender ...
Best Answer
The official guideline (in the US, at least) is no more than 2 hours, total, between 40°F (4°C) and 140°F (60°C). So, if your room is fairly cool, and all the ingredients were cold, at two hours in the off crock pot, you're just inside the guideline.
But the problem is, if you just turn the crock pot on, it will take at least another hour to get up to 140°F. That puts you firmly outside the guideline.
Instead, assuming this is chicken pieces (in a stew, soup, or similar) and not a whole chicken, I'd suggest you bring it up to at least 160°F (70°C) stove top over fairly high heat (this should only take a few minutes), then transfer that to the crock pot. You can then cook it in the crock pot on low.