This month, we are going to be covering some lifestyle products that will help out the gamer who is pressed for time or otherwise wants to speed things up so they have more time for gaming. First up in our lifestyle series is the Deenkee pressure cooker.
Gaming is fun, but it’s hungry work. Hell, it’s also thirsty work, but drinking beer while gaming can make a tough game harder. You ever drink a 6 pack and try to beat a Dark Souls boss? I’ve already tried it for you and I can tell you, don’t bother, it’s frustrating and extremely hard. But that’s neither here nor there.
There are few things worse than getting home from work, desperate to squeeze in a few precious hours of gaming before sleep buries you and realizing that you have nothing to eat. Now what? You can’t go without eating, but going shopping, coming home and cooking is going to negate any chance you have of playing anything at all. Sounds like another greasy pizza which equals a $25 pounding to your wallet's backside or eating hot garbage from a fast food restaurant. Well, screw that.
Introducing the Deenkee 6 in 1 Pressure Cooker, here to solve your culinary woes. Looking to be the answer to the suddenly-exploding-with-popularity Instapot, the Deenkee does all that the instapot does and more, which is a pretty long list: it sautees, stews, steams, makes cakes, makes yogurt, it will pasteurize (what?), cook rice, brown meat and even just keep stuff you dump in there warm. While making 6 quarts of yogurt seems weird, it is comforting to know that you can do it if you are a yogurt enthusiast, plus, you can make your own flavors. So, score.
Out of the box, you get the electic pressure cooker, a ladle, measuring cup, glass lid, sealing ring, user manual, steam rack, silcone hand mitts and recipe book. The pressure cooker comes with a metal pot instead of a ceramic one, undoubtedly increasing its longevity, which is a nice touch. The unit feels sturdy and solid and the lid has a tilting mechanism to swing wider than you’re probably used to, opening up like crocodile’s jaws to get at the pot inside, making it easy to clean.
The pressure cooker works exactly as it should thus far, with everything we’ve prepared coming out fast as all hell and cooked all the way through. One gripe is that due to the nature of the pressure pot, it does tend to leave more liquid inside, instead of cooking it all the way down like I'm used to; admittedly, this may be a ratio issue on our part. While the device itself works well, there are some issues we found with the recipes and booklet.
First off, the recipe book has a slew of recipes, but someone screwed up at the print shop and about half of the pictures were definitely not depictions of the recipes they were displaying, like the pulled pork recipe that showed a dish with meat on the bone. Definitely not pulled pork. The salsa chicken and rice dish had a picture of a half of a pineapple filled with shrimp and a bunch of other ingredients that I didn't quite recognize, but it most assuredly was not salsa chicken. This did not inspire confidence in the recipes for sure.
The second problem was with the instructions themselves, which were often nonsensical, like they were run through the worst translator you’ve ever seen. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge problem, but paragraphs like this one definitely raised some alarming questions: “Make sure venting smoothly. Safety device for pressure releasing if device of pressure releasing: if device of pressure maintaining fails to work, pressure beyond maximum, pressure release from lid surrounding, to avoid appliance explosion.” Uhhh… That said, the device itself is pretty easy to figure out, and to be honest, I was never planning on using their recipes much anyways (despite the recipes being a feature listed in the description).
Despite those hiccups, this cooker gets your eats into your face fast, which is generally the point. Rice takes about 7 minutes or so and we were able to hard-boil eggs in less, around 5 minutes. There are pre-sets as well, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of things, like oatmeal, broth/soup, egg, yogurt, meat/stew, beans, etc. So far, I’ve tried two of my own recipes: beef stew that I usually make in a Dutch oven or a large crockpot and carnitas that I generally make in a Dutch oven as well. On top of that, I’ve made three of the recipes in the recipe book that comes with the cooker, and they've all turned out pretty well, with my own recipes cooking in half the time, and besides some extra liquid, coming out the same in texture and flavor.
You can check out the cooker here, and you can even get 15% off for a limited time with the amazon code O2JOL7FR.
