How do you slow-cook soup in a multipot without it venting out too much liquid?
I mostly use my multipot as a pressure cooker, but today I used its slow-cooker function to make soup. The manual says that when using it as a slow cooker, leave the pressure vent open (not closed like for pressure-cooking). I did that, and it vented most of the liquid in my soup out, leaving me with...not soup.
There are two temperature settings for slow-cooking, high and low. (The documentation does not say what temperatures these correspond to.) I haven't tried the experiment of leaving the vent closed yet, because I don't know what trouble that would be inviting. Pressure-cook times are typically in the range of 30 minutes; I slow-cooked this soup on high for five hours.
How is the slow-cooking function supposed to work on a multipot? Is it safe to leave the vent closed? Do I need to only use the low setting and not high? Should I be looking for a problem with the pot itself? I don't see anything obviously wrong, but that doesn't mean I'm not missing something.
1 answer
Slow cooking is characterised by a slow and low heat cooking process. For you this means that you put too much heat in the cooking process and that your food essentially (as you noticed) dried out. Basically, you took the process of grilling and prolonged it. (Grilling is a high heat, short term cooking process in which a lot of water on the outside of the food which is grilled is lost while the inside stays a at least a little bit hydrated.) So the next time you should definitely stick to low heat for slow cooking.
Regarding your kitchen tools, it'd advise to do as instructed, so keep the pressure vent open. Generally speaking, keeping the lid or a vent open or closed is primarily based on how "watery" you want your food to be. Meat and vegetables lose a lot of liquid in the process of cooking so that it might be wise to have an opportunity for the water to evaporate correctly. (With a closed pot, the water will just stay in the pot and can't evaporate.) For a soup, leaving the pot open is the exact opposite as you don't want liquid to escape.
Taking both together, your food was very hot for five hours. Hot food "produces" a lot of evaporated liquid which has to go somewhere. You used an open system so that the water escaped, leaving you with something more similar to a sauce than a soup.
You can read more about the topic on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_cooker
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