Life in the slow lane: how the slow cooker changed the world
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Ultimately the results are better, but it’s lead to a couple of one hour delays on meal time in my household because I forgot to take into account the extra time. These often involved a “rapid depressurization procedure” of taking the Instant Pot to the deck, and holding the release valve up with a long wooden spoon.
It's still true that your "15 min cook" is actually time_to_get_to_pressure + 15 min + time_to_cool
Meal prep depends on the meal as well. Try a Colombian chicken stew - cut a few potatoes, some tomatoes and onions (rough, just into quarters) and chuck them in the pot with some chicken legs/thighs and bay leaves (and salt and pepper). That's minutes to prep, and doesn't have to be done just before dinner. 25 minutes and then release the pressure. I'm not sure why you carry it outside and use a spoon, you can turn the valve then leave it for a few minutes.
Most meals take a lot less time to prep than that, and prep can often be separated from cooking, some parts by days.
> the times it take for the vessel to come up to pressure (~ 30 minutes)
5-15 would be more accurate.
> and time it takes to depressurize (~15-30 minutes).
Instant pot quick release only takes a couple minutes; natural release takes longer, sure, but that’s usually included in recioe times that use it (many of which have partial natural release for a set time followed by quick release.)
For times when you need to do a full natural release because of the kind of food (to avoid fouling the valve) but want it to be faster, the Pro (and Duo Evo) Instant Pot models support an optional ice tray accessories that is placed on the lid to effect a rapid natural release.
> These often involved a “rapid depressurization procedure” of taking the Instant Pot to the deck, and holding the release valve up with a long wooden spoon.
The Instant Pot as a button (or pull switch on the Pro) for quick release, what is the purpose of your procedure besides gratuitous drama?
There's probably an element of perceptual time compression involved too. Even if the total overhead time is actually 20 - 30 minutes, it might as well be 45 minutes.
Manual depressurization is messy. Yes, I can use a towel over the release valve to keep brothy splatters going on the wall, but now I have a brothy towel that I could have avoided if I waited 20 minutes.
It releases steam. Aside from not having the valve close to a wall, not sure why this is a big deal.
Low and slow yields better results for dishes like a pot-roast, but for many other things, a pressure cooker is a must have. I never buy canned beans anymore.
Most low-and-slow is better done in an oven, so the main thing you are left with is fire safety (e.g. if you want to leave it going and go to work). If you aren't careful you trade that off for food safety, anyway.
I see the appeal for convenience if the mediocre results don't put you off.
You also gain the ability to cook without heating up the whole house.
Use a bit of water in microwave safe dish with a lid almost closed. This is like steaming and microwave cooking all at once.
With kids, I sometimes do things in the instant pot I could probably do quicker outside, I'm happier leaving it on the counter rather than leaving a burner on.
That said, it makes a better pork shoulder than anything else I've ever done!
Obviously YMMV
If you want sticky rice, congee or a korean style multigrain blend, then yeah, most cheaper American cookers will fall short.
This is what I do and I get perfect rice every time.
[0] https://www.pressurecookingtoday.com/how-to-use-the-pot-in-p...
There's no way I'm fitting my rice cooker pot inside of my instant pot, that's for sure.
To me there is no contest, instant pot is a much better rice cooker - faster, more energy efficient and most importantly better texture. We got rid of our rice cooker once we figured that out.
I remember in Jiro Dreams of Sushi they use an ad-hoc pressure cooker to make the rice, so I think there really might be something to cooking rice under pressure that improves it.
Haven't tried the pot-in-pot method yet, but that's meant to be even better.
For brown rice i use a bit more water. Maybe 1:1.25 rice to water.
That doesn't sound like anywhere near enough water to me. I do roughly 1 cup of jasmine rice to 1.5 cups of water in my instant pot, comes out perfect every time.
1 cup of water, 1 cup of rice and cooked on the rice setting.
1:1.5 sounds like a very mushy rice. Horses for courses I suppose.
Plus if you can hydrate while you eat, it's more efficient!
FWIW I have trouble imagining needing more than 10 minutes at high pressure for anything like potatoes. Maybe even a few less.
Cooking them for an hour would be similar to boiling stovetop for 3+ hours!
If I cube them, it's more like 9 minutes.
Perfectly mashable.
60 min definitely seems off.
We've never owned a slow cooker. But I'm pretty sure I'd be in a load of culinary discomfort without my instant pot (or the back-up Indian pressure cookers).
It and this reminded me of a different hack I heard about at one point, using whip cream dispenser to do herbal infusion. Seems the pressure helps transfer the flavors. Just open a window unless you want to get high while cooking (sharp instruments and hot surfaces are better employed by a clear mind)
The slow cooker entered into a world of working mothers, it was a Have Your Cake and Eat It Too invention, because like the automatic timer on a coffee pot it let you be elsewhere while the food prepared.
The instant pot partly solves that problem but also solves another: The slow cooker requires forethought and stable dinner plans. The instant pot lets you make last hour decisions. For long commuters, the person stuck at the office can tell you they're on their way home and the food is hot shortly after they get there (though to be fair, slow cookers have a forgiving window of edibility). If you're a space cadet you can still prepare a fancy meal even if you didn't think about it in the morning. And even if have to run to the grocery store for ingredients.
Among other things, the InstantPot is a slow cooker.
I use an instant pot which does slow and pressure cooking
Another game changer for me is the Anova Precision Oven. Baking with steam and the ability to quickly and precisely switch between different baking methods is great.
Pressure cookers on the other hand are awesome. Fast, energy efficient and results in a similar outcome for the most part.
Anyway, it's great for crisping things in a way that frying (deep or shallow) might otherwise do, but with very little oil required.
Examples - lightly cornflour'd chicken or pork to give a little crunch in sweet & sour pork / chicken. Butcher-prepared chicken kievs that would otherwise need a lot of oil and be a mess to cook. (Sweet) potato wedges, usually heavily herbed. These can be done with a a very light coating of oil, typically sprayed rather than tossed.
The carbohydrate aspect of these foods is a bigger concern to me than the oil, but nonetheless.
I do salmon fillets in it now instead of in the pan, or roasting up some chicken breast, even steak if you’re in a real hurry.
1. Buy an air fryer.
2. Try it a few times.
3. Tell everyone in the familiy, at the work place and on social media how awesome an air fryer is.
4. Never use it again.
The only ones for me that have survived the test of time are the pressure cooker and the toaster oven.
I finally found a second-hand air fryer, but they do seem scarce so far.
Double ovens are a thing but you rarely see apartments outfitted with those and if you already have an oven, air-fryer makes more sense than replacing single oven with double oven.
My air fryer has a toaster oven form factor[1]. The fan is much more powerful however and it has extra heating elements. Otherwise it literally is a toaster oven with convection, even says so in the name!
Conceptually all of these are very similar, it’s just the balance of heating power and fan speed that make the difference, though marginal it may be from an engineering design standpoint.
Typical air fryers have a basket design[2] that helps with splatter control, but they are otherwise again the same.
There's nothing about an air fryer that they couldn't have made them in the 50s. How did they take so long to exist??
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halogen_oven
[2] http://www.lamptech.co.uk/Spec%20Sheets/TH%20SP%20IR%20Thorn...
I know nothing of the technologies involved but I suspect the air fryer makes things easier because it's easier to get the desired effects in a small heating area (the basket) than the oven.
This means it’s under powered. On top of that, the temperature might be high but energy delivery is not. That means the temperature right around the items actually drops, like how being still in cold water creates a static layer of warm water that keeps you warmer than if you’re moving around in it. With fast moving air you get significantly more heat transfer.
This is what convection ovens do but those are under powered in both heat and air flow, for my use case. Enough that I don’t use them at all, while I use my air fryer multiple times daily. Mine actually has the form factor of a toaster oven, so it’s a very easy comparison.
It’s literally just a stronger version of a convection oven, with different marketing.
> reduce energy use
I’m not so sure. It takes my air fryer much less time to cook things, so without doing the numbers I can’t say which is more efficient. I’d say that’s more about cost.
An oven that takes longer to get to temperature is wasting energy, not using less, because of greater waste from losses to the surrounding environment.
I follow this recipe and cook for eight hours in the crock pot on low.
https://www.kcet.org/food-discovery/food/weekend-recipe-pull...
I don't know how to describe it but there is definitely a noticeable "slow cooker flavour"
A dutch oven on a standalone induction "burner" is a fine slow cooker.
The fond-friendly nature of the enameled-cast-iron dutch unit is one of its best qualities.
I find the biggest difference is in nonstick, the fond sticks to the food instead of the pan. So you can't deglaze and make a sauce. On the other hand, sometimes the nonstick is better, like with seafood imo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_pot_cooking#In_European_c...
Is the subtext that this is marketing - the gifting season is upon us, and the competition from newer brands e.g. Instant Pot, fierce?
We do have a couple of other crock pots / slow cookers which we use to make great dishes like pulled pork etc. It’s just the Instant Pot which hasn’t worked out for us.
Other Instant Pot users: what am I missing? Is the main advantage supposed to be that you can prepare meals fast because it’s a pressure cooker? Or should I pull it out and give it another shot?
But I don't get one, since my head says: "Where would you put it in the small apartment? And anyway you're well fed already. It doesn't fill a gap."
I guess if you're really busy and/or have a lot of mouths to feed then they're better value?
That's it, though. Don't use it to cook real food.
With a pressure cooker, it takes several minutes to depressurize, and the required seal precludes using a wired oven thermometer. So you just have to kind of guess and hope, which often means things are slightly over-cooked (since that's safer than slightly under-cooking).
I find that baking falls into two categories:
1) Pie or roast - No closed cast-iron pot in use, so you don't need to open the oven, you can see in through the glass.
2) Baking bread in the closed cast-iron pot with the lid on, do not open the oven or raise the lid during this phase!
In neither case do you "open the oven and take a quick look"
This can really affect what you are baking, not always a good idea.
Best sources are the pressure cooker recipes on Serious Eats [1], I especially recommend the Pho Ga [2], the Mushroom Risotto [3] and the Bolognese Ragu [4].
Another good source is hippressurecooking (I use the book[5] rather than the website [6]) - the book is worth it for the of method and time alone for e.g. beans, and the recipes are not as good as the Serious Eats ones, but many are good (I like the Filipino Chicken Adobo). I've used it in combination with other sources, as a way to adapt to the faster pressure cooking times (Urad Dal, using the ingredients from Ottolenghi, but method from Hip Pressure Cooking. Mind you if I have the time, I tend now to make the Dishoom House Black Dal).
1: https://www.seriouseats.com/pressure-cooker-recipes-5117325 2: https://www.seriouseats.com/30-minute-pressure-cooker-pho-ga... 3: https://www.seriouseats.com/pressure-cooker-mushroom-risotto... 4: https://www.seriouseats.com/pressure-cooker-ragu-bolognese-s... 5: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hip-Pressure-Cooking-Laura-Passagli... 6: http://www.hippressurecooking.com/
I don't like to use the pressure cooker for meat, for exactly the reasons you state. For one, higher heat of an oven produces different chemical changes, which generally taste better; for two, with pressure cooking, a lot of the fat seeps out of the meat and ends up in the broth, leaving it tough and tasteless. I feel the same way for potatoes and sweet potatoes -- I much prefer the flavor which the higher temperature of the oven brings.
That said, my wife actually prefers chicken / potatoes / sweet potatoes cooked in the pressure cooker; so when we buy a chicken, if I get to it first it's baked, and if she gets to it first it's pressure cooked. :-)
Where the pressure cooker shines is cooking grains and beans: quinoa, freekeh, chickpeas, black beans, kidney beans, lentils, etc. They all take a really long time to cook on the stovetop; but take quite a reasonable amount of time on the pressure cooker. (In fact, we bought our pressure cooker when we were experimenting with a "plant-based" diet.). But then you're not done: you still have to add fat and flavoring.
Workable alternative would be Sous-Vide which allows lower temps but much longer times. Even up to days.
One meat I have sometimes done as apartment dweller is ribs and then oven for glacing.
Pot roast seems like a bad fit since with a roast you’d typically want the roasted outside in the dry heat of the oven. You also need things that have enough water that will generate enough steam to build up pressure, so low moisture things won’t turn out well either.
Other things: it will make a really decent stock in less than an hour. It can do wonders with dry beans. If you want to try again, these guys are mostly pretty reliable as a starting point: https://www.seriouseats.com/pressure-cooker-recipes.
Stock is so much quicker to make and is completely different than store-bought.
Otherwise the key for slow cookers is that anything that needs to taste fresh (like peas) are added in the last half hour. But it’s about time saving otherwise.
Saute 1-1.5lbs sliced mushrooms + 1-2 onions w/ 4 tbsp butter until soft, add 2 tbsp chopped herbs(thyme, oregano, something like that). Add 2 cups arborio rice + 2 cups veggie or chicken stock, pressure cook for 6 minutes, quick release, stir in 1 cup peas, big handful of spinach, a boatload of shredded parm, and serve with even more parm shredded on top.
Cooking beans in the pressure cooker is fairly quick and easy, even if I don't soak them. I package the beans in packages that are a bit smaller than a can and freeze them. I'd probably do this more often if I had more freezer space.
My crock pot's inner "pot" is also stovetop and oven safe: I can saute the onions and things before starting the slow cooking if I want without using extra dishes. This is the thing that crock pots are often lacking: The bits of cooked food adding flavor. Of course, I'm also the type to roast potatoes for potato soup. And I'm probably partial to some soups (and spaghetti sauce and pot roast) in the slow cooker as we had one growing up.
He mainly just cooks meats in it. He does the sides when he gets home from work.
I used to imagine only dishes like you mentioned--the whole meal is in the cooker.
Pulled pork is really good out of the slow cooker. Not as good as smoked, but pretty close, and anyone can do it with about ten minutes effort, vs a lot of effort on the smoker.
It's also nice for keeping things hot over time. We took mashed potatoes to Thanksgiving dinner in one today so they'd be easy to keep hot until the meal without monopolizing stove space.
It's about time to do the opposite: offer aside appliances that maximize all possible energy production peaks for self-consumption. It's more neurotic than calm, far more expensive for various reasons, but far cheaper for those who have p.v. etc. So crafting a "two systems" it's needed in transition terms...
Isn’t that common in North America? Why do you have to buy an extra appliance?
With a slow cooker, you don't leave the hob on for 8 hours; they have a low wattage (relatively speaking) heating coil that won't even get a pot of water up to boiling point (generally).
I looked at all those super-sized integrated oven, microwave and countertop holes, and I wondered: Why are we still designing small kitchens like this? isn't a Do-it-all multi cooker enough 90% of the time?
The slow cooker may have changed the world, but it did not change our kitchens.
If you own it and live in it sure you can not have a stove or oven if you want. But then if you ever sell it and the next person wants one... its going to hurt the value I imagine.