Oster Pressure Cooker

Many people think pressure cooker and the first word that comes to their mind is dangerous.  I'm not going to say there isn't danger in using one, but isn't there danger in using a burner on your range, your oven, or even just your good knives?  Mostly gone are the days of hearing about a bursting pressure cooker, but the returns on cooking tender and flavorful foods a bit quicker than other methods, its always nice to have that option.

Oster Pressure Cooker

The Oster Pressure cooker is perfect for those that fear using a pressure cooker or don't really want to worry about how to use one.  At the same point, if you have an idea of how to use one, and are one who tends to use directions more like guidelines than actual rules, you might want to look into something better.

The thing that makes the Oster nice is it has presets for just about anything you might want to cook.  Need to get that chicken done in 30 minutes versus baking for an hour, toss it in with some stock and set it for chicken, and it will start cooking, and give you the time that it should be done.  You can do some minor tweaking with the times as it does give you some plus or minus adjustments, but the differences in time aren't huge, and you can't see the time it is going to set until you hit the start button.  But if you are just interested in making your meats, poultry, vegetables or rice, and having them come out tender and moist, its an easy option.

The thing that makes the Oster kind of annoying is it has presets for just about anything you might want to cook, but that is all it has. If you find a recipe and it gives you high and low and a time, you might have to spend some time, to figure out which preset could give you those settings, and I will be honest I haven't even remotely thought about that.  If I am that concerned at this point about that I will use my stove top pressure cooker.

One really nice feature of this little device though is the removable non stick inner pot.  Clean up of the inner pot is easy as can be, and since it is light weight and lacks a handle of a stove top pressure cooker, its much much easier to deal with.    On the other side of that, cleaning the lid isn't quite so easy, its pretty good size and bulky, not a huge deal killer, but still not near as easy as the inner pot.

In general this isn't a bad little device, me personally I wish I had decided to spend a little more and get something that I had more control with the settings, but since it is not something I use all the time it works out well when I do.   I decided I wanted chicken enchiladas one night, but didn't put chicken in a crock pot in the morning, so I could shred it later, nor was I going to wait over an hour to bake it. Got out my pressure cooker and somewhere around 30 minutes or so, I had my chicken took it out, shredded it and got to putting my enchiladas together.

If you want the options to cook with a pressure cooker, but don't necessarily want to learn about how or look up a ton of information, this could be a great starting point.  Although you might grow out of it quicker than you realize.   However it can always be your backup rice cooker, or primary if you don't have one.

Good luck in the Kitchen!