Dream Cooker

Most multicookers greet you with a grid of labelled shortcuts: soup, yogurt, rice, beans. Press one and you are trusting somebody else's idea of what rice needs. The Dream Cooker has none of them.

Our Place's Dream Cooker runs on four modes, pressure cook, slow cook, sauté and sear, and keep warm, with time and heat entered directly on a touchscreen set to low, medium or high. That is the whole control panel. Pressure is where it earns the counter space: Our Place puts it at up to 80 percent faster than slow cooking the same dish, by sealing the pot so the liquid inside can climb past boiling point without the food drying out. Steam release is automatic, so nobody has to stand over the valve with a wooden spoon.

The inner pot is aluminium under Our Place's own ceramic non-stick coating, the underside of the lid is stainless steel, and the outside of the body stays cool while it runs. Nine safety features sit behind the lid lock. Timers run to two hours on pressure, twelve on slow cook and twelve more on keep warm, which means a braise can be finished hours before anyone is hungry and simply wait there at temperature.

It holds nine cups of rice or eight servings of stew, and Our Place says the design went through ten rounds of prototypes and more than 10,000 hours of testing before any of it shipped.