The Impatient Chef

You don’t get home until 6pm. You take care of a few things and relax for a moment and all of a sudden it’s 7pm. You decide what to cook and then prep it and it’s 8pm. You put it in the oven and wait an hour and it’s 9pm. You check and it’s not quite done, so you put it back in and it’s 9:15pm. You finally sit down and eat at 9:30pm. You fall asleep in your food.

Sound familiar?

Cooking — especially roasting — takes a long time. That was OK back in the days when someone was home at 3pm to put the pork roast in the oven, but these days it means that if you want to cook for yourself you’re going to have to wait.

Unless, of course, you take advantage of Mr. Puck’s fantastic cooking contraption. It’s a “pressure oven,” which means pretty much what it sounds like. It uses pressure like a standard pressure cooker to reduce the amount of time necessary to cook, and it has a heating element like an oven to provide that roast-y quality.

It purports to “seal in” flavors and juices in meats, and some reviewers agree that it does (sometimes). But this “sealing in juices” business has become some a buzzword in TV informercial hucksterism that it’s hard to know how much we should care.

The reason to get it is because it cuts down on cooking time. A 5-pound pork roast that would take 75 minutes can be pressure-baked in 35. That’s more than twice as fast. Mr. Puck claims his fantabulous roastrarium can cook a 13-pound turkey in 55 minutes, and it might be able to, though you’ll have to wedge that bird in there.

Another consideration for those of you currently experiencing a heatwave (or what seems to be a heatmonth): Less cooking time means less time blasting the oven and heating up the whole house. And we’re not sure but we figure that since this oven is pressure-sealed it emits less heat overall than a standard oven (please tell us why we’re wrong).

You’ll need some counter space for this contraption, and it won’t replace your microwave, but it’s a nice addition for any home chef interested in eating before bedtime.