New assistant housewives - multicooker: pros and cons

If before a woman could afford to do exclusively household work, now, with an inexorable rise in prices and incredible stability of salaries, for many this is an unacceptable luxury. In most families, a woman works on a par with her husband. At the same time, no one freed her from the duties of the mistress of the house and the guardian of the hearth.

Manufacturers of household appliances are not far behind and are releasing more and more mechanical and electrical assistants for housewives. One of these assistants has become a slow cooker. Now it is already in almost every house. But is this assistant really so good? Each thing has its own strengths and weaknesses. Let's try to analyze in more detail the pros and cons of the multicooker.

Slow Cooker Advantages

They are not so few. The main positive features are as follows:

1. The most important advantage of the multicooker is that the hostess does not need to take part in the cooking process. It is only necessary to prepare the products and immerse them in a bowl. And then everything is simple - select the desired program and start the process. No stirring or standing over the dish - the crock-pot will do everything for you.
2. Many modes in one device. It can cook various dishes. Cook soup and porridge, stew meat and vegetables, cook steamed dishes, bake a pie and so on. To cook all these dishes, you don’t need a lot of equipment - a multicooker performs all these functions.
3. A bowl coated with Teflon will prevent foods from burning and escaping milk from porridge.
4. In the evening to cook breakfast? Easy thanks to delayed start. The timer for a day allows you to load products, for example, in the evening, and the device will begin to cook by morning. Or vice versa. In the morning, load everything you need into the bowl and set the time one hour before your arrival from work. When you get home, dinner will be ready.
5. The mode of maintaining heat will not allow the dish to cool if you are not free by the end of cooking.
6. Security plays a big role. While cooking in a slow cooker, you can not worry about your own hands. You will not get burns from steam and hot oil.
7. Caring for the device is as simple as simple - you just need to wash the cup, wipe the lid and drain the condensate.
8. Economical consumption of electricity and oil. Such trifles also help to save the family budget.

Cons of slow cookers

Each invention, no matter how useful and thoughtful it may be, has its own negative features. Slow cookers are no exception. The disadvantages of a multifunctional device include:

1. Necessary location near the outlet. The wire in the multicooker is quite short, so you have to free a place on the table. The disadvantage of this item can be called for small kitchens.
2. A multi-cooker can be compared with a multi-disciplinary master - he can do a lot, but has quite superficial knowledge in each subject. A slow cooker, with a large number of functions, can only cook standard dishes. You will not have to wait for culinary masterpieces from her.
3. Only one dish can be cooked at a time. Maximum side dish and steaks will be ready at the same time. So for cooking several dishes you will need to use the stove or spend a lot of time.
4. A long cooking time is another minus. But at the same time, your time will be spent at least. So how far is this a flaw, you judge.
5. Some dishes still have to be mixed. Unfortunately, such a function is not provided.
6. When the dish is ready, the lid remains closed and condensation from it on some models may get into the dish. But if you open the lid, the food will cool. In general, plus or minus is everyone's business.
7. Price can also be attributed to the minuses. Devices with many features are quite expensive.Budget models contain a minimum of functions that may be needed.
8. Teflon coating is very easy to damage. When this happens, the bowl can be immediately thrown away, and finding a new suitable one for sale is not so simple.
9. Of course, a baking function is provided, but not everything will turn out to bake here. And turn the casserole and even more so.

Harm and Benefit

As with any innovation, many myths have appeared around the multicooker.

One of them says that the food prepared in it, not only loses its beneficial properties, but also becomes harmful. If you look, vitamins from products go away with almost any heat treatment. So it is when we fry, cook, stew, bake, and so on.

In addition, cooking in a slow cooker requires much less vegetable oil, or it is not needed at all. Thus, the amount of bad cholesterol in food is significantly reduced.

The main advantage of the multicooker is to save the time of the hostess. Perhaps the idea of ​​a multicooker was aimed at this.

Someone is afraid of the inner coating of the bowl - Teflon. It seems like he releases some harmful substances. But the fact is that not all bowls in multicookers with Teflon coating. There are many models with ceramic.

It is proved that Teflon coating can harm health if it enters the human food during its decay. But! Teflon disintegrates after 5 years of operation, and in the multicooker bowls it disappears after 2 years. And the acid contained in the coating disintegrates at a temperature of more than two hundred degrees. In a slow cooker there are no such temperatures!

After a case with the identification of violations in the production of the notorious coating, due to which harmful substances were released, control of Teflon products was significantly tightened. This does not give rise to manufacturing firms to somehow save on quality.

Should I buy a slow cooker

Why is a crock-pot needed at all? First of all, to save time on cooking. In addition, cooking in it is very simple: you only need to adhere to the recipe. Even a person who has never cooked will not be able to spoil the dish, strictly following the recipes.

Nevertheless, this thing is useful, it takes up little space, and there are more than enough functions.