Perhaps most convenient, the collagen-rich beef bone broth that took two days to cook down in my slow cooker was ready in an afternoon, without making the whole house smell like soup (which is nice for the first couple of hours but then gets really old).

But the electric pressure cooker does have its shortcomings. The most notable failure in the meat category was the whole chicken. The recipes I tested came out with slack and soggy skin, and either stringy and dry white meat or undercooked dark meat. I did have more success with sake-steamed skinless chicken breasts, which were evenly cooked and perfumed with the delicate rice wine and fresh ginger. A nice dish, though how often does one really want to eat steamed skinless chicken breasts?

I didn’t like it much for vegetables either, most of which don’t benefit from the intense pressure of high-heat steam (beets and artichokes being the important exceptions here). Broccoli, kale, zucchini, fennel, brussels sprouts and mushrooms turned limp and unappealing.

They also took longer to cook than if I had used a skillet on the stove. The manual tells you an ingredient only needs, say, five minutes to cook, but that doesn’t take into account the 10 to 15 minutes required for the machine to build pressure, in addition to the time needed to release the pressure, which brings the total to around 20 minutes. I can do a lot of great things to vegetables with a skillet, some olive oil and garlic in 20 minutes. In general, this is a good rule of thumb: If something takes 20 minutes or less to cook conventionally on the stove, use the stove.

Another pressure cooker downside: They just don’t do crisp or crunchy. Although most cookers allow you to brown meats and vegetables on the sauté function before cooking, any crunchy bits will wilt under the pressurized steam once you lock on the lid. Though I might use the pressure cooker for potatoes if I were going to mash them, I would never be able to achieve anything like the crisp-edged roasted potatoes I can get in the oven. And in the future, I’ll stick to roasting my whole chickens, so I can crunch on the shards of browned, salty skin.