We bought a 10 quart stainless steel Fagor pressure cooker Thursday night. Sheri requested my potato salad and barbeque pork for Independence day, but I didn't want to boil a big pot of potatoes for 20 minutes with the air conditioning on, and the temperature and humidity what it has been. So with that as an excuse I could justify buying it.

It works great! Five minutes and almost three pounds of potatoes were cooked perfectly. Almost all of the heat stays in the pressure cooker, so the kitchen temperature barely increased (I didn’t even break a sweat). Almost no steam was released while it was cooking, so the humidity stayed out of the house. When it was done cooking, just dump all the steaming water down the drain.

The old fashioned pressure cookers have a weight that sits on top of the steam escape pipe. When the pressure gets to about 15 pounds per square inch, the it pushes the weight up, steam escapes, and the weight drops back down, and the process repeats. The weight wiggles back and forth with a lot of steam escaping.

The newer models are spring controlled and are more accurate, and therefore release less steam, and you don't need to add as much water as you did with the older models.

The only problem is that the model we got didn't come with anything to keep the food off the bottom of the pot, so the potatoes on the bottom got a little browned and stuck. We stopped at Meijer's and bought a collapsible steamer insert with little ½" legs on the bottom. This will keep food from sitting directly on the bottom of the pot.

We are trying to decide what to cook in it for tomorrow night. You can cook a pot roast with all of the vegetables in just 25 minutes!

I originally was looking for a Presto pressure cooker. That's what I grew up with, but it looks like the two big pressure cooker makers now are Fagor and T-Fal. Farberware also just released their first pressure cooker, but I couldn't find it anywhere.