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Comment by AtheistOfFail | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but people tend to exclude that since you're not watching the pot.

If that is how cooking times are my slow cooker can make a mean stew in a few minutes - but you'll need to start it a half day before you want to eat it. If you remove the foil from a lasagna for the last five minutes and set a new timer, did it only take 5 minutes?

I don't get the trend in instant pot directions to say it only takes X minutes when it is really warmup + X + cooldown. It really doesn't help anyone know when to start cooking a meal.

I can make anything from ice cream, cheesecake, pizza, stew, sauces etc. from scratch without a recipe, but I find instant pot recipes to be some of the worst I've ever come across. It has a steep learning curve. That said, I think I'll like it when I figure out how to get what I want out of it. Maybe I'll even write a real recipe for it.

Half a day is a bit of an exaggeration - I've been making the best beef stews of my life in under an hour, including prep, warm up, cook, and steam release.

Likewise pulled pork in just a shade over an hour, perhaps 10 minutes actual prep time.

I think they meant half day for a traditional slow cooker (most recipes say low for 8 hours).

Then it should be more like 30 seconds, 15 to put things in and 15 to take things out, or are you watching it for those 7 minutes? Just trying to point out that you should quote the actual time it takes.

The soul of marketing is getting people to overlook stuff like the laws of physics, the arrow of time, and compound interest. Any time you find yourself resorting to the word "should," it's a good idea to ask:

1) why would the universe naturally favor order? 2) why would the order it favors please my sensibilities?

Questioning the above premises will often yield opportunities that a rigid attention to preconceived notions would not.

So despite all those buttons it's too cheap to have a 7 minute timer?

Or are we excluding one unwatched time but including another unwatched time for some reason?

Most home pressure cooking is sensitive to your local air pressure. You already have to adjust for that. And the kinetics of pressure cooking mean that structural changes that happen while getting up to temp will be a rounding error compared to full temp, for all but the shortest cook times.

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