You could try hitting the meat with a meat hammer a little bit before cooking. My mother does that for steaks, but it should work for cholent as well.
@Jeruba Amongst Central Asian Jews, our cholent-like dish (called Oysavoh) is served in a large central platter and everyone scoops a little bit into their personal plates. In fact, most dishes in my family are served this way.
For those who are interested, Oysavoh is prepared by sauteeing cubed meat (beef, lamb and even chicken can be used), together with carrots cut julienne-style, diced tomatoes, slices of green apple and this fruit called Alcha in Farsi (don’t know the English name for it: it is small, brown and sour with a big seed in the middle. When cooked, the meat of the fruit just melts off the seed). After the sautee, white rice is added and plenty of water. The whole thing is cooked on a low-medium flame until the rice is super-cooked and mushy. Here’s the weird part: you add whole eggs, in the shell, right into the rice stew. Then the pot is placed on a super-low flame. My mother actually takes the metal brackets from all the other burners and stacks them on top of each other, with the pot on top of the whole thing. The pot is sealed in foil, covered and left on the really low flame for something like 12 hours. Even with the pot so far from the flame, the rice at the bottom burns into a blackened, crispy yumminess, called Tadigee. The hard-boiled eggs, instead of being white, are brown (don’t know if it’s from the rice and meat surrounding them or just the super-long cooking time).
Anyways, it’s a difficult dish to pull off; amongst the “super-chefs” in my family, it’s one of the few dishes they will concede that my mother does best.