Tag Actifry

ActiFry, Instant Pot or Slow Cooker?

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ActiFry, Instant Pot or Slow Cooker?

One Big Pot!

Dieting is tough. If I don’t have the right food on hand, I’m going to eat the wrong food, right!?! Bulk cooking is a way to ensure that we always have a meal in a container. And if we’re lucky, it’s a meal that meets the dietary requirements for our current regimen. When it comes to bulk cooking, I want to make the maximum amount of food, with the minimum of fuss. And as little mess as possible. That usually means that I pull out my big 50 gallon pot. Or one of my one-pot wonders … the ActiFry, my Instant Pot, or my most recent acquisition, the slow cooker.

The benefit is that we can toss a bunch of stuff into any one of these things & hit go. Depending on which one gets fired up, we’re eating half an hour later. Or maybe we get to enjoy the cooking smells for 6 or 8 hours before we dig in. It’s our choice.

If speed is important, you just can’t beat the Instant Pot. It is fast, clean & efficient. The only drawback, & the failing in mine not the Pot’s, is browning. I don’t want to dirty another pan, so I brown my meat in the Instant Pot. I never deglaze properly &, as often than not, I get that burn warning when I close the lid. Forcing me to open it up, scrape the bottom of the Pot, & restart. For that very same reason, thickeners are better added at the end. That aside, this thing will turn old boots into melt-in-your-mouth food in double quick time. Depending on which model you go for, it does all sorts of other tricks. One of my favorites is the yogurt button. I like high fat yogurt & this thing does an amazing job with a no-boil yogurt. Though the cost for my preferred ingredients means that store-bought is probably still cheaper on sale. Since the pot liner is removable, cleanup is a breeze. This is a great little cooker.

Having ignored slow-cookers most of my life, I recently succumbed to peer pressure! With all day cooking times, having to think this far ahead was a little alien for me. But I found it surprisingly easy to get into the rhythm. Turns out that, as a morning person, it suits me. Toss a bunch of the appropriate foods into the crock, hit go, & come back later. Much later. I’m tired by the end of the day &, rather than cook, I tend to make poor choices with whatever is more readily available. If this baby is doing its thing all day, the cooking smells have me drooling by dinner time. And then it delivers! There were a couple of surprises here. The evaporative losses are minimal. So you wind up with almost the same amount of liquid at the end, as you started out with. This requires a little post processing if you want to thicken the sauce. The other surprise is that meat is tenderized to the point of falling apart. Yet the potatoes remain whole. How does that happen!?! Like the Instant Pot, browning may improve results. But you’ve got to do it on another pan. And that’s really the only downside. You don’t have to brown, but it does make the dish taste better. And look better.

The T-fal ActiFry is a well-used machine in our house! Diet or not, I like fried food. The first thing I did when I got this little beauty was toss out the little green spoon! You know the one? The instruction book tells you to limit yourself to two little spoonfuls of “heart-healthy” fat to make your French fries. Forget that! Hide that spoon & you will feel no guilt! I’ve tried everything in this. With & without the paddle. With & without the optional rotating basket. If you put enough fat in there, they all taste great. I generally use coconut oil or olive oil. But I’ve done bacon in the thing. And then used the bacon fat to cook French fries! Or mushrooms. Mmmmmmm! If you can stop fish sticking to the basket, that’s a great meal too. Other than the power cord getting a little hot during cooking, this little beast is great. I really like the flavor of the food coming from it.

My big pot! The good old fashioned saucepan. It’s a big thing with a small handle on either side, like little ears. You can beat this thing with a hammer, stir & scrape it with a metal spatula, or toss it outside the back door when the sink is full. The only downside is that you do need to sit it on the stove. For speed, it falls between the Instant Pot & the Slow Cooker. And, whether you need to or not, you’re going to come by to stir the contents every now & again. You can brown in it, but it too requires deglazing. Though it’s not as fussy as a lidded device. Its one big advantage is that liquids evaporate & the sauce thickens. Because you’re stopping by every now & again, it gets stirred & tasted. For a cook-by-feel person, that’s a plus. The other big plus of a plain old pot is its ability to release the flavors from spices. For me, that is mostly done by cooking the spices in hot oil for a few minutes, ahead of dumping in the major ingredients. By the time the cooking is done, this makes for a better blending of flavor than when you just add spices to the liquid in the pot.

So which one is best?

With the lidded-pots, you have to work a little harder to match the flavor of the regular old pot. But for convenience, you can’t beat these set-it-and-forget-it style pots. Fast or slow? Really depends on the day. The ActiFry is a totally different beast to the others. And it can be used by the low-fat & high-fat folk. Each one wins in a different way. But if you were to strand me on a desert island with just one, I’d probably have to stick with the trusty old pot.

Thankfully, I don’t have to choose. And they all have their place & space in my kitchen.

What’s your favorite?

Best One-Pot Cooking Appliances

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Best One-Pot Cooking Appliances

Slow-cooker makes a meal of it!

Over the course of my “career” in the kitchen, I think I’ve had just about every small appliance that ever showed up in the stores. Or on a TV infomercial. And over time, I found myself dropping off most of them to the local thrift stores. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now, wouldn’t you?

Not!

Just splurged on a slow-cooker the other day. Don’t know why, but this might be the only one I have never tried before. It was on sale, so my “big splurge” cost me $29.95. And that was Canadian dollars. How do they even make the box & packaging materials for that kind of money? Never mind ship the thing to Canada from …. oh, never mind, you know what I mean. It’s just a silly price. And if this thing stops me getting take-out … just once … it’s already paid for itself.

The first meal was an eye of round roast. I know, I know … mea culpa … but I’m surrounded by skinny people who like lean meat! Now for a guy who drives an induction stove, because it’s so fast, this thing was a just a little frustrating starting out. No action. Nothing. C’mon pot, give me some sizzle or something!

Nothing. Nada. Nil. Is it even working!?!

I’ll be eating steak tartare come evening time, won’t I?

Came home after work to one sweet-smelling kitchen. Or should I say savory! And to a lump of beef that was falling apart. Yet, the potatoes hadn’t turned to mush. How’d it do that!?! This is an interesting little pot. I think I’ll be spending some more time playing with the thing.

And when I’m done, I’ll talk more more about why a guy like me needs so many one-pot cooking devices. I sense a head to head coming up between the programmable multi-purpose pressure cooker, the air-fryer, & this new slow-cooker.

And we’ll see what it does to my waistline at the end of the month! 🙂

Eat More Fat!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment

Eat More Fat!yougurt copy

With advice from just about all of our governments, certainly in the west, & our medical communities, we have spent several decades now trying to reduce our fat intake. During that time, I think we may even have achieved that goal, but western populations continued to get fatter. Higher fat diets, though now far more prevalent, are still considered unhealthy by the majority. You don’t need to go any further than the dairy case in the supermarket to see which philosophy is leading in the popular opinion stakes. The low & reduced fat milks predominate. Low fat & 0% fat yogurts occupy most of the shelf space. This, still current, reality was more harshly brought to my attention when I joined a couple of Facebook groups over the recent holiday. I joined some Instant Pot® communities so I could learn more about my new toy. Then I realized there were probably groups out there for my much older T-fal Actifry® too. There were!

In both communities, you’ll find that supermarket pattern mimicked. The tone of many comments suggest that eating low-fat is just a given thing. Obvious & matter of course. An indisputable & irrefutable fact that goes unquestioned. Many people are trying to avoid the fat. Indeed, the Actifry was designed for that very purpose. When I first opened my Actifry, I threw away the little green spoon that suggest that I limit my fat! On the Instant Pot® groups, I shared my yogurt success with the 10% fat cream. The silence was deafening! And as other conversations resumed, most went back to talking about low fat ingredients again. Though there were some using, almost with guilt, that positively decadent whole milk!

I find it very difficult to lose weight without adding fat to my diet. While I’m still struggling with getting back on track after the holidays, fat is still very much a favored part of my diet. I can only diet well when I up the fat intake. Eating a good diet, for me, means that I’m not putting on still more weight during times of stress. And fat is equally useful when I’m trying to lose weight. Why is fat so important?

Consider the mainstream dietary regimen of choice during past decades, the recommendations all centered around eating less and moving more. That basically means eat a low-fat, low-calorie diet. Fat has more calories per gram than protein or carbohydrate, so it sounds like the obvious macronutrient to target. Protein is touted as the best macronutrient for satiety, so who needs fat? While all these are true, reducing fat in my diet has never worked well for me. Most often, it was because I couldn’t stick with the low-fat diet that remained.

Adding fat to my diet helps me stay the course better, & for longer. Will it get me to where I want to be? We’ll see.

Now I am not implying that I simply added a big dose of fat to the diet that was already making me fatter. Though even that might have helped displace some of the more truly fattening foods I was eating! The deadly combination, for me, is fat combined with sugar & processed starches. Though I can do a good job of gaining weight eating products advertised as low-fat, or zero-fat, too.

We’ll take a look at some of those fats that I consider good another time but for now, I’m off to enjoy some more of my 10% fat yogurt!