All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker

I’ve had my All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker for about four to five years, and it is as durable and dependable as the day I first bought it. My wife and I have a little vegetable garden where we grow carrots, squash, tomatoes, and other healthy foodstuffs. (I try, but my wife has more of a green thumb than me). We use the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker for canning the small harvests that we get from time to time. We can usually get 3-7 cans out of each batch.

Update: These pressure cookers are currently on sale through this link on Amazon.

I’m impressed with the huge amount of time and energy that we save using the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker. We used other canning methods once, but the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker does it quicker and easier. We had a bit of a trial-and-error period for trying to preserve vegetables too – food spoilage is no joke and botulism is nothing to laugh at; but we discovered pressure canning to be the safest method to ensure that all our preserves are safe. All we do with our All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker is to set our sealed cans on the rack, pour the right amount of water, and regulate the right pressure. We’ve recommended the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker to our likeminded green-thumb friends, and they love it as well.

What’s more important is the food seems to taste better. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but we’ve used the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker to process tomatoes too using the hot water bath. (The only difference is you don’t need the pressure regulator on; you just need to let all the steam escape) We seem to have tomatoes that taste better than when we used our last cooker. Of course, you can only use pint jars because of the small size of the cooker, but we don’t preserve a lot of food anyway. We just can enough for a rainy day.

We had a larger canner before we got the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker, but it was an import (which I’m not going to name). It was lighter, but with a rubber seal that went faulty. We weren’t using the space efficiently anyway; it could hold more than double the amount of cans than what we normally use it for. The All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker won’t let you handle a lot of quart jars like the larger models, but it was just perfect for our needs. What also made us shift from the imported brands was that we knew someone who owned one and had a seal crack while cooking. You can imagine what escaping superheated steam can do when it ruptures. Luckily, no one was hurt. Of course, you do still need to take precautions

The All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker is heavier and not as flashy-looking, but it’s safe and we’ve never had problems with it. Of course, you do still need to take some precautions as with any other pressure cooking devices. One of things I needed to watch out for while using the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker is not to overfill it with water or try to cool a hot one by using wet rags. I didn’t use our previous pressure cookers that much before I’ve had it, so it was important to breeze through the manual.

Speaking about safety precautions, the only other thing I wanted to mention about the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker was that you need to make sure to keep the vent pipe clean and free of debris. The vent pipe is connected to the lid cover with the pressure regulator fitting on top of it. The regulator weight is made to make sure that excess steam gets released, but when the pipe gets clogged, it will not vent steam. There is a “caution” range that you need to be aware of and when that needle gets to that range, you need to immediately turn your stove off without moving the cooker until it gets cold. You just need to make sure to clean the vent pipe or send for a replacement part.

Well, this has turned into a little lesson in safety more than a proper review of the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker. I guess all those warnings my mother used to give me when a pressure cooker was on in our household made an impression. All in all, for safety and convenience, I recommended the All-American 10-1/2-Quart Pressure Cooker to people who love to can and cook.

If you want to buy these pressure cookers, you can get them on sale on Amazon through this link.