Should I buy a pressure cooker?

We've never had one, but Norma has spied this gizmo that is a combination electric pressure cooker/rice cooker/crock pot (already have a crock pot). Do you own a pressure cooker? How do you use it or does it permanently reside in the cupboard or garage?
We'd probably get some use out of the rice cooker, but on the other hand, rice preparation has never been a real issue for us.

[Robin Garr]

The appliance of the '60s, perhaps best left there.

It saves a little time. So does the microwave. It screws up the texture of food a lot worse than the microwave.

I'm also with you on the rice cooker. My Inner Geek wants one, but my Inner Cook knows there's no really compelling reason to buy a machine to do something that can be done very well by hand.

We use ours three or four times a week. It is great for dry beans; you soak them over night, put in cooker, bring to pressure, relive pressure, drain bake in oven. They are also great for potatoes and other veggies. We don't use it for rice. We have never had it destroy or even mangle any food. Of course you must not overcook anything in it or any other appliance or pot.

Dulce de leche! (...just "process" an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk, let it cool, then open)

While I'm not a fan of all-in-one appliances, I love our (non-electric) pressure cooker. I'm sure incompetent cooks can destroy texture, but they can do that on stovetop as well. As noted, pressure cooking is the easiest and most fool-proof way to do dried beans. The way I use the most the PC the most is dal- ever met an Indian cook who didn't use a pressure cooker? Sure, you can do it without, but quicker and more dependable .

Modernist cuisine take here
http://modernistcuisine.com/2013/02/how ... kers-work/
that carrot soup rocks, I didn't make but a friend did, maybe my favorite soup of last decade

I use for stocks, and for a variety of dishes, in no case am I compromising. OK, if I do the 15 minute seafood risotto it might not be QUITE as good as if I had spent an hour plus but it's pretty close.

My wife bought one years ago when she stayed with some friends who use theirs on a daily basis. I don't think I've used it once. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be very useful, though. I think that once you start using one and get the hang of it, you might end up using it a lot.

I think you'll find Ming Tsai, Alton Brown, Pierre Franey, Jacques Pepin, Heston Blumenthal, and many others are fans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4nOIRoe6mU

I actually have a pressure fryer (slightly lower psi than a pressure cooker). I initially got it - don't laugh - because I desperately wanted to make real Kentucky Fried Chicken. The stuff in the bucket. And now I do! It's great.

Originally that's all I used it for, never having wanted a pressure cooker. But just over the last couple of years I've been playing around with it more and more and finding I enjoy it more and more. It has a lot more uses than merely pot roast, which I think is all my mom every used hers for. I'm thinking now of getting a proper pressure cooker one of these days to get the full benefit of high psi.

Here's a pretty good testimonial from Modernist Cuisine: http://modernistcuisine.com/2013/02/how-pressure-cookers-work/

I also love my rice cooker, and am now on my second one. The advances in fuzzy logic computer technology in those things is impressive. Yeah, I make perfectly fine rice by conventional methods. But there are a couple of advantages to this little wonder gizmo. For one thing, you can load up the rice hours (a full day on my machine) in advance, punch in when you want it to be ready, and at the appointed time you'll have a hod full of rice waiting for you. Pile stuff in the steamer basket that hovers over the rice, and it will cook at the same time. Open the lid and you've got a full meal. I use this feature a lot since I get up at 3am. I put rice and water in the bowl in the afternoon, stuff in the steamer tray if I want, and when I wake up I just dump the now cooked meal into a Tupperware and bring it to work for lunch.

(One of my favorite meals this way: chunks of butternut squash mixed with thinly sliced onions and raisins, dusted with curry powder and/or garam masala, and coated in olive oil and/or butter. Bam. Instant biryani.)

The other big biiiiiiiiiiiig advantage I've found is its holding capability. As in, it holds rice perfectly once its cooked. For HOURS. So if you want rice omelet for breakfast, Sicilian rice balls for lunch, and a stir-fry over rice for dinner (followed by rice pudding) you just have to make one large batch of rice in the morning and pull from it as you go along. 10 hours later that rice will be as fresh as if you'd just pulled it off the stove. It's pretty amazing, really, and very useful.

A lot of the functions that modern rice cookers offer are never going to replace traditional methods, of course. But they're still a lot of fun to play around with. I've made some absolutely spectacular cakes in mine, along with real yeast breads, meat loaf, etc. And mine has a "Saute, then Simmer" button. It heats the pan on high so you can saute aromatics, miropoix, whatever. Then when you dump the rest of the ingredients in it senses the weight change and lowers the heat to simmer/low. I've made some pretty good dishes that way, and sometimes it's a welcome feature on a hot day when even the thought of running the stove just makes your eyes start sweating. And that's just scratching the surface. They really do a helluva lot more things than you might imagine if you don't own one. Consider who uses them the most: Japanese, in tiny kitchens. 'Nuff said. Again: won't beat pots, pans and ovens. But pretty nifty anyway, and often useful.

Winger said:

Should I buy a pressure cooker?

I sez:

Let Mikey try it!

I found this one that claims to deep-fry too - http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-NEWWAVE-MUL ... 2ed3dabb6a

I was thinking of it as a possibility for sous-vide cooking; if the temperature controller is precise through the range of sous vide cooking temperatures, this is small capacity sous vide on the cheap. It would also replace the rice cooker already on my countertop, and additionally offer high-quality small-batch deep fat frying for the same amount of counter space.

Yeah, I think you should buy this one and review it for us...

[Jenise]

The appliance of the '60s, perhaps best left there.
It saves a little time. So does the microwave. It screws up the texture of food a lot worse than the microwave.

Are you just taking a contrarian stand for the fun of it? I have to ask because every time someone brings up pressure cookers, Robin, you sing this same song in spite of the fact that expert cooks who would not stand for screwed up food textures, like Dale and I, explain to you that there's apparently a lot you don't know about pressure cooking. And I'm actually dumbfounded that your inner geek is attracted to a rice cooker (talk about a single purpose tool, and it's BIG!) but not a pressure cooker as the latter has so many versatile uses that are equal to or superior to regular, long-method, stove-top cooking, even to a low-and-slow/no-shortcut cook like me!

Now to answer 'Winger: beans as others have explained, artichokes in 15 minutes, perfect brown rice in 20, potatoes ready for hashed browns in five, etc. And here's a testimony: awhile back I had nothing thawed or fresh ready for dinner, and it was late. I took some veal shanks out of the freezer, lightly browned them while still frozen in the bottom of the pressure cooker, added onions, sherry and some herbs, then pressure cooked to a degree of perfect tenderness never before achieved with regular stove-top cooking--at least, in a hunk I could pull out of the pan whole. The result was absolutely brilliant--and I had an upscale-restaurant worthy dinner ready, from frozen, in about 30 minutes. As someone else said, the longer you own it, the more uses you find for it. There's an excellent PC book out there by Lorna-someone (a copy came with my pressure cooker, which I only got about four years ago so I too am a new convert)--you can probably google her name and find a lot of recipes that will demonstrate how useful you might, or not, find owning one. Btw, I don't use it for regular rice--I get a perfect result on the stove top, and we're only talking about 20 minutes cooking time and enough rice for two people. Rice cookers seem to be the most useful to families who cook a significant quantity of rice on a daily basis--every Asian family I know uses them, understandably so.

The appliance of the '60s, perhaps best left there.
It saves a little time. So does the microwave. It screws up the texture of food a lot worse than the microwave.

Are you just taking a contrarian stand for the fun of it? I have to ask because every time someone brings up pressure cookers, Robin, you sing this same song in spite of the fact that expert cooks who would not stand for screwed up food textures, like Dale and I, explain to you that there's apparently a lot you don't know about pressure cooking. And I'm actually dumbfounded that your inner geek is attracted to a rice cooker (talk about a single purpose tool, and it's BIG!) but not a pressure cooker as the latter has so many versatile uses that are equal to or superior to regular, long-method, stove-top cooking, even to a low-and-slow/no-shortcut cook like me!

Now to answer 'Winger: beans as others have explained, artichokes in 15 minutes, perfect brown rice in 20, potatoes ready for hashed browns in five, etc. And here's a testimony: awhile back I had nothing thawed or fresh ready for dinner, and it was late. I took some veal shanks out of the freezer, lightly browned them while still frozen in the bottom of the pressure cooker, added onions, sherry and some herbs, then pressure cooked to a degree of perfect tenderness never before achieved with regular stove-top cooking--at least, in a hunk I could pull out of the pan whole. The result was absolutely brilliant--and I had an upscale-restaurant worthy dinner ready, from frozen, in about 30 minutes. As someone else said, the longer you own it, the more uses you find for it. There's an excellent PC book out there by Lorna-someone (a copy came with my pressure cooker, which I only got about four years ago so I too am a new convert)--you can probably google her name and find a lot of recipes that will demonstrate how useful you might, or not, find owning one.

Preach the word, sistah!

Are you just taking a contrarian stand for the fun of it? I have to ask because every time someone brings up pressure cookers, Robin, you sing this same song in spite of the fact that expert cooks who would not stand for screwed up food textures, like Dale and I, explain to you that there's apparently a lot you don't know about pressure cooking. And I'm actually dumbfounded that your inner geek is attracted to a rice cooker (talk about a single purpose tool, and it's BIG!) but not a pressure cooker as the latter has so many versatile uses that are equal to or superior to regular, long-method, stove-top cooking, even to a low-and-slow/no-shortcut cook like me!

Now to answer 'Winger: beans as others have explained, artichokes in 15 minutes, perfect brown rice in 20, potatoes ready for hashed browns in five, etc. And here's a testimony: awhile back I had nothing thawed or fresh ready for dinner, and it was late. I took some veal shanks out of the freezer, lightly browned them while still frozen in the bottom of the pressure cooker, added onions, sherry and some herbs, then pressure cooked to a degree of perfect tenderness never before achieved with regular stove-top cooking--at least, in a hunk I could pull out of the pan whole. The result was absolutely brilliant--and I had an upscale-restaurant worthy dinner ready, from frozen, in about 30 minutes. As someone else said, the longer you own it, the more uses you find for it. There's an excellent PC book out there by Lorna-someone (a copy came with my pressure cooker, which I only got about four years ago so I too am a new convert)--you can probably google her name and find a lot of recipes that will demonstrate how useful you might, or not, find owning one.

Preach the word, sistah!

Guess I'll join the choir and just buy one.

Guess I'll join the choir and just buy one.

[Robin Garr]

Are you just taking a contrarian stand for the fun of it? I have to ask because every time someone brings up pressure cookers, Robin, you sing this same song in spite of the fact that expert cooks who would not stand for screwed up food textures, like Dale and I, explain to you that there's apparently a lot you don't know about pressure cooking. And I'm actually dumbfounded that your inner geek is attracted to a rice cooker (talk about a single purpose tool, and it's BIG!) but not a pressure cooker as the latter has so many versatile uses that are equal to or superior to regular, long-method, stove-top cooking, even to a low-and-slow/no-shortcut cook like me.

Naw, no contrarian, I. Probably I just remember my Mom having a pressure cooker and cooking bland, mushy stuff in it.

As for my inner geek, he might like the IDEA of a rice cooker, but he's not going to GET one. Sorry I didn't make that part clear.

Probably I just remember my Mom having a pressure cooker and cooking bland, mushy stuff in it.

My Mom didn't need a PC to do that.