Hamilton Beach 5 qt Slow Cooker Bad taste and smell I have purchased a Hamilton Beach 5 qt slow cooker.  Made Wild Rice Chicken Soup in it for 7 hrs on low and after 4 hours I checked it and tasted. Delicious. 3 hours later I shredded the chicken and shut it off. It smelled and tasted delicious. Left it on warm and when I opened the lid 2 hours later, the smell was so disgusting that I gagged. The smell was a cross between melted plastic and something rotting. My hubby thought I had gotten sick in the kitchen. The smell lifted somewhat to just smelling like plastic.  We couldn't eat it though because it still smelled and tasted like melted plastic.  I had no problem with it the first time I used it. I could find no burnt or melted plastic anywhere on the cooker.  What would have caused this. Would any ingredients do this.  Wild rice, balsamic rice and normal soup stuff. I am returning the cooker but don't want to have this problem with another one.Made
It sounds like the cooker malfunctioned. An electrical fault inside the unit may have caused a short that caused some component to burn. Various electrical parts can give off strong acrid odors when this occurs. It's possible that the nature of the fault was such that its circuit only came into play when you switched the unit to "warm".

However, assuming it's a typical slow cooker with a ceramic bowl and glass cover, I don't know how the taste would be transferred inside to your cooked food. Perhaps the odor was so strong and held in the air such that it affected your taste buds.

In any case, you are wise to return the unit. Whatever happened to yours is likely an unusual occurrence. Hopefully it won't happen again to its replacement.