My mom once burned both her arms really badly using a pressure cooker to try to boil water quickly. It says right in the instructions not to do that, and she always said it was her own damn fault, but I still feel a twinge of guilt over it. You see, she’d asked me to make some Jello for her to take to an event that evening, I had forgotten and gone out bike riding, and she was trying to hurry the process to get it done in time. It’s almost 50 years ago now, and she died 14 years ago (it had nothing to do with the burns!), but the shame is still there.
Hey, I think I just figured out why I never use my actual pressure cooker!
It’s a shame you Mom was injured, but I suspect that’s an example of the 99% way pressure cookers injure people.
Not through exploding, but through someone in a hurry muscling off the lid while the contents are still under some pressure. As soon as the seal is cracked a bit, the pressure collapses and lots of 212F+ degree liquid is forced out the opening at great speed. Right onto the person doing the opening.
Same thing happens if someone removes the radiator cap from a car while the engine is even semi-warm. The loss of pressure produces an instant geyser of very hot water/coolant. Oops.
Heating increases chemical reaction speed, which is basically what cooking is, exponentially. As a general rule of thumb in organic chemistry, a 10 degree C increase in reaction temperature doubles the reaction rate. That matches up pretty much perfectly with what people seem to be saying, with cooking speeds 3 to 4 times faster in a 30 F (17 C) increase in temperature. There might also be additional benefits to the pressure allowing water to enter the food, or more efficient heat transfer.
In addition to increased cooking speed, are there unique chemical changes that happen at the higher temp that give the food a different taste, texture, or other characteristic? Like with meat, it has to be cooked at a high temperature (like on a grill) in order for it to brown. Does the increased temperature in the pressure cooker unlock similar chemical changes that only happen at high heat? For instance, are beans cooked at PC temperatures chemically different than beans in a regular pot?
We eat a lot of rice/beans/soups/stews/chili. I THINK we might own a crockpot, tho I’ve never used it, can’t recall having seen it being used, and wouldn’t know where it might be. Never owned or used a pressure cooker or instant pot.
I’ve never understood meals to benefit from extremely long cooking time, and never found cooking without such devices overly cumbersome - certainly not to the extent worth acquiring and storing another pot/appliance.
Some things really benefit from low and slow cooking. For Christmas Eve I made a lamb shoulder that cooked for 10 hours. It was delicious (also very easy to make…a few ingredients, pop it in the oven and forget about it).
Depends on how you define “extremely long.” For stew cuts, you need 2-3 hours to break down the collagen and get a soft-to-fall-off-the-bone result. For broths and stocks, you want hours to extract every bit of flavor from the meat and, once again, collagen from the bones. With stuff like beef, you’re looking at 6-8 hours, and sometimes even more. With chicken, a couple hours will generally do; I like to do about three to four.
With slow cookers, it’s like the above, except that you can leave the house and have a ready meal when you come home.
You can, of course, do all of this with a Dutch oven if you have the time (which I do a couple times a week when I have a little more time and want to start prepping dinner in the early afternoon or even late morning.) One plus for the Dutch oven is that you get some concentration of what you’re cooking through evaporation, as well as some extra caramelization or Maillard or whatever. I do find that slow cooking stews in my Dutch oven tends to taste a bit deeper than stews in my Instant Pot, so if I have the time, I go Dutch oven.
My mom had a circa 1950 pressure cooker that she used often. It didn’t scare her (she survived V-1/V-2 rockets, and incendiary bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe along London’s bomb alley during the Blitz of WWII), but it scared the bejesus out of me as a kid. It steamed, rumbled and shook the kitchen like a gas-filled beached whale ready to blow.
I inherited that cooker, but I never dared to touch it. So, I gave it to my older brother (the one who used to lock me in the closet when I was a wee lad).
But, I use my Instant Pot with no worries at all. It purrs like a content kitten and hacks up delicious meals.
All substances have what is called a specific heat capacity, which is a measure of how much heat energy per mass that substance can hold. Water has a really high specific heat capacity, which means it can hold a lot more heat energy at a specific temperature than other substances. That’s why you can stand 350 F air over your bare skin for a bit when taking those cookies out of the oven but the same exposure to 212 F water will burn you horribly.
It’s water’s high specific heat capacity that makes the 30 degree difference so much more energetic than a 30 degree difference of temperature in air (say 320 v. 350) makes.
My mother has a big aluminum pressure cooker that she’s used for decades. It has a small removable weight on the pressure relief valve. So as it’s cooking, the weight moves back and forth, making a rhythmic noise as it releases steam. That is a very familiar noise to me.
I’ve heard of pressure cookers all my life, but never had one or knew anyone who did.
Always thought of them as a sort of 1950s thing that was of its time and isn’t really used much anymore?
But if anyone has good use cases, I am willing to have my ignorance educated…?
I’m not one to jump on the kitchen gadget bandwagon. When my grandparents passed we received from their estate a nice Breville toaster oven, a food processor, and this oversized top-end Vitamix blender. We never used the blender or the toaster oven so we gave them away; I still have the food processor but I don’t think I have ever used it.
Because being a Luddite is apparently part of my DNA I’ve avoided an Instant Pot on more-or-less on ideological grounds. Like most behavior based on ideologies, I’ve realized that’s quite irrational. Both my stove and my oven are pushing 60 years old and function about as well as you’d expect 60 year old appliances to work – poorly at best, non-functioning at worst. To replace them would mean first rewiring those circuits (modern versions of the oven and stove would require separate circuits and right now they’re on one undersized circuit), which my wife wants to use as excuse to remodel the entire kitchen. Since we’re at impasse on this issue I’ve been using work-arounds: we have 4 crock pots and they all get regular use, I have a WSM charcoal smoker, and a 22” Weber charcoal grill. All of those are preferable to using my crap stove or oven. Limiting myself to crock pot meals or stuff I can grill gets to be a PITA and when I get home from work I’m exhausted and the idea of doing anything more complicated than a bowl of cereal or microwaved burrito is dreadful.
So this thread has me rethinking getting an IP. A lot of what’s been discussed in this thread such as stocks, hard-boiled eggs, chili, stews, and roasts are things that I make fairly often and because my stove sucks so horribly cooking anything on it is something of a crapshoot. I’m resigning myself to the idea that a kitchen gadget that I’ve long eschewed could actually be a boon.
I think I’m going to take the plunge and get an Instant Pot.
So are there any particular features that I should look for, given that I’d likely be cooking the usual suspects named in this thread? We have two teenagers that eat like pigs and often have friends over to boot, so the bigger the capacity, the better. Other than that I don’t know squat about them or what I should look for when I shop for one.
8 quarts is the largest model Instant Pot makes (the “regular” version is 6 quarts). The basic model pressure cooks and also functions as a slow cooker or a saute pan. Another $100 will get you air fryer capabilities as well. It’s pretty simple to use. Mostly a “dump ingredients in, close it up, push a button, walk away” kind of appliance.
I do not have an Instant Pot but I have found America’s Test Kitchen to do a good job on reviews. If nothing else, they help distill how to think about the features/design you should be thinking about when assessing some given product. The video below is three years old but I don’t think these models change a lot. The tl;dw final answer from them is the Instant Pot Duo Evo Plus 8-quart pressure cooker.
My brother has one and the ONLY time he ever uses it is in August every year when he cans green beans and tomatoes. Sadly IMHO there are few grocery items cheaper than these foods, but he is convinced that “big food” is poisoning us. Needless to add I am NOT the one who had cancer last year.
Yeah, you missed the big Instant Pot explosion…I mean, craze. It was something like 2017 or 2016 when they seemed to be everywhere. I recall Amazon having some Prime Day sale back then, which is when I purchased mine initially, and then it seemed like all my friends, and even my mother-in-law started buying them (or similar stovetop models.)
ETA: Yeah, looks like 2016 was the first Amazon Instant Pot Prime Day sale:
I would buy an Instant Pot as big as your family needs with the bells and whistles you want, or a similar PC with good ratings from Amazon. Then you should find PC recipes online that interest you, like this site.
I think that’s the year I got mine, and so did two co-workers. All of us bought them for our sons or sons-in-law on sale for Christmas (I got mine at Target) and all of us discovered that the recipients did not, in fact, want an Instant Pot, so all of us just kept them.
(the one who used to lock me in the closet when I was a wee lad).
Since we’re at impasse on this issue I’ve been using work-arounds: we have 4 crock pots and they all get regular use, I have a WSM charcoal smoker, and a 22” Weber charcoal grill. All of those are preferable to using my crap stove or oven. Limiting myself to crock pot meals or stuff I can grill gets to be a PITA and when I get home from work I’m exhausted and the idea of doing anything more complicated than a bowl of cereal or microwaved burrito is dreadful.