What do I look for when buying an electric pressure cooker?

Steel cut oats a few times, made beef bourguignon (or something like it) once and that was pretty good.

Bananas and chickpeas could be interesting

Nice try FBI

Insta Pot

This is the one I think I like

>what do I look for when buying an electric pressure cooker
A normal pressure cooking pot, since they're always better

I checked it up but they seem to be less energy efficient and more hands on. Electric pressure cookers can just be let alone and even preset to turn on an hour before you come home to have your meal ready for you.

I use a stovetop one, a presto 01370, but I can understand why someone would want to buy an electric one.

Size 8 qt, easy to clean, reliable, dependable pressure regulation system that won't clog and require special cleaning all the time.

I asked for one of these for Christmas

>I checked it up but they seem to be less energy efficient and more hands on
That's true.

But the manually operated ones are much more reliable/durable, are able to be used for canning food, are easier to clean because there's no danger of getting water into electronics, and are available in practical sizes. Every electric one I have seen has been too small.

>Every electric one I have seen has been too small.

The image in the OP is one with 8 litre capacity although I do agree that they'll never or be really hard pressed to beat out a manual capacity one.

These are great for rice, beans, soups, some can sous vide, I've used mine to deep fry. Also mone broke once and it was as easy as replacing a temp probe. Ordered a probe on amazon foe a buck and now it gets hotter to

8 liters sounds like a lot, but it really depends on what the shape is like inside.

I had one that was also marked 8 liters, but it couldn't hold a whole chicken, duck, or a decent sized pork shoulder without it coming above the "over fill" line.

Most important feature is a stainless steel inner pot, because it's the most robust and easy to clean.

I've got one which says the inner cup thing is 'anodized', I think that applies to metals. Might be aluminium though.

>and even preset to turn on an hour before you come home to have your meal ready for you.
Which means your food was sitting around at room temp for six or seven hours previously. Not a good idea.

Being able to turn it on and not have to monitor it while doing other stuff seems very handy though.

It is possible to anodize aluminum. Aluminum is a great conductor of heat so it not a bad material to make the inner pot to be made of. Steel would be stronger, heavier, and retain heat longer, the best possible combo though would be a inner pot made of a sandwich of steel with an aluminum core. That way you get the durability of steel and the even heating of aluminum.

Unattended cooking is a handy feature, and a big plus to these electric pressure cookers (and slow cookers), but that is not the same as prepping your evening meal in the morning before work and setting the timer to start cooking 7 hours later.
The important thing here is that is it is cooking unattended, not just sitting around at room temp. Which is why cooking in a slow cooker for 8 hours is not an issue, but leaving your food in a slow cooker for 4 hours then cooking it for 4 hours would be.

I will make great pains to attend to my foods where need be and not leave them sitting around.

Hopefully this pressure cooker can expand my palette some, especially in the vegetables area as that's somewhere I'm sorely lacking.

Put the ingredients in frozen. It doesn't matter if they're still frozen when the cooking starts because the timer doesn't start until it reaches the correct temperature.

Make sure your stove top pressure cooker is approved for canning. Not all pressure cookers are made equal, and usually specific pressure canners are safer

I'm not aware of any electric pressure cooker that reaches high enough temperature for general purpose canning, although they may be usable for canning sufficiently acidic foods.