Slow cooker, pressure cooker or oven — which should I use for the same dish?

These three appliances are usually compared on speed, which is the least interesting difference. They produce genuinely different food from the same ingredients, and once you know how, choosing is a matter of what you want on the plate and what your day looks like.

Step by step

1. Compare on time to the table.A beef stew is roughly 35–50 minutes at pressure including coming up and releasing, 2–3 hours in a 150°C oven, and 6–8 hours in a slow cooker on low. The pressure cooker's advantage is real and large. The slow cooker's is not speed at all, it is that the hours are unattended.
2. Compare on flavour concentration.The oven wins clearly. Some liquid evaporates and the exposed surfaces brown, so the sauce concentrates while it cooks. A sealed pressure cooker and a lidded slow cooker both lose almost nothing, so the sauce stays as dilute as you made it and tastes flatter. Both usually need reducing afterwards, or less liquid at the start.
3. Compare on texture.Pressure cooking works above 100°C, which breaks down collagen fast but is also hard on the muscle fibres — meat can go from tough to soft-and-slightly-shredded with a narrow window in between. The oven and the slow cooker both work below boiling and give a firmer, more sliceable result. For pulled meat, pressure is ideal; for a piece you want to serve in slices, the oven is better.
4. Compare on attention required.A slow cooker can be left all day, which is its entire point. An oven braise needs you in the house but not in the kitchen. A pressure cooker needs you present for the beginning and the end, and it is the only one of the three with a real hazard while running.
5. Note what each one cannot do.A slow cooker cannot brown, cannot reduce, and cannot cope with anything that needs a short cook. A pressure cooker cannot be opened to taste and adjust mid-cook, and overcooks vegetables into mush very easily. An oven cannot be left running while you are out, and it ties up the oven if you were also going to roast something.
6. Brown first, in all three cases.None of these appliances browns while it cooks — one is sealed, one is wet and cool, and the oven braise is under a lid. Colour the meat and soften the aromatics in a pan or in the appliance's sauté function before the long stage. This one step accounts for most of the difference between a dull braise and a good one.
7. Adjust the liquid to the vessel.Take the oven recipe as the baseline. For the slow cooker, cut the liquid by roughly a third, because none of it will leave. For the pressure cooker, use only enough to generate steam and stop it catching — often much less than the recipe says — and reduce it hard afterwards with the lid off.

Alternatives

• Multicooker: One appliance that pressure cooks, slow cooks and sautés. Good if you want one of the three functions and have no room for three machines; the sauté function is usually weaker than a hob and the slow cooker function weaker than a dedicated one.
• Hob with a heavy casserole: A tight-lidded casserole at the lowest simmer on the hob does what the oven does, using less energy, but needs watching to keep the base from catching and heats unevenly from below.

Questions people ask