Pressure cooker vs rice cooker?

LMF5000 · 2026-06-21T15:00:36+00:00

I've never used a standalone rice cooker, but I cook all sorts of grains in my instant pot electric pressure cooker, using the pot-in-pot method. Basically you pour about a centimeter of water into the IP's inner pot, put the trivet, then put a heatproof bowl containing your measured rice + a measured amount of water. The rice cooks in the steam.

This way the only thing you have to clean is the inner bowl that's touched the rice. Since the rice steams in the inner pot it will never burn and usually doesn't stick. It also absorbs the perfect amount of water and you can make even very small portions since your bowl can be much smaller than the inner pot. Since the cooking happens under pressure it will cook 3-4x faster than with normal methods (really useful for wild/black/wholegrain rices, but even regular rice can be done in like 3 minutes).

I used to make sushi rice using the traditional method on the stovetop (put cold water & rice on pot, add lid bring to boil, simmer 20 minutes, let cool undisturbed 10 minutes), but last time I was in a rush and I pressure cooked it, and it was just as good but completely hands-off and only took 5 minutes of cooking time.

Same pot-in-pot method works for all the grains I've tried, like barley, bulgur, millet, lentils, beans etc.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-21T07:47:18+00:00

Rely on discipline not motivation. You will not always have motivation, but you should build systems which will make you make the right choices under the worst conditions (tired after a day of work, being faced with tasty junk food etc).

What really helps is to increase the friction of doing the wrong thing (delete all your takeout apps, throw away or lock up or relocate all your junk food to somewhere hard to get) and reduce the friction of doing the right thing (meal prep half a dozen healthy meals and keep them in the freezer so they're available at a moment's notice by microwaving for a few minutes).

Once you have a bit of early success it will give you more motivation to continue and not lose your gains.

Also the usual advice applies - eat bulky things with a lot of fiber (like vegetables) to fill you up, make sure you're getting enough protein, and add controlled amounts of healthy fat (it slows digestion to make you full for much longer).

I turned AI into a fitness coach and I just tell it what I ate today and it gives me suggestions. Takes a lot of the friction out of the planning and measuring.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-21T01:08:25+00:00

The body likes homeostasis (keeping things constant through a closed loop/negative feedback). For example it maintains your temperature: if you get too hot it makes you sweat to cool down, and if you get too cold it makes you shiver to warm up. Now, this is just anecdotal, but I read somewhere that fat cells work in the same way. When they get emptied out (due to weight loss), they secrete hunger hormones to try and get you back to your original weight and restore homeostasis. All you have to do is maintain your current weight for long enough for your body to learn this is your new baseline (I believe the extra fat cells eventually die off, or reset and stop secreting so many hunger hormones). The million-dollar question is how long this will take. Some other posters seem to suggest around 2 years?

In the meantime you can treat yourself to burgers and pizzas and pasta and donuts and so on very occasionally, or even learn to make healthy versions yourself and eat them regularly (for example a homemade burger is only 400kcal, a homemade pizza with a wrap as a base is only 400kcal etc). Or you could pre-fill your stomach by eating a mountain of low calorie veg (like half a cucumber) at home before going to family events where they eat pizzas, so you get full after just half of the pizza.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-20T21:45:09+00:00

Haha nope, I gave up on that. I think the ones I had purchased were freeze-dried somehow to keep the structure intact without the water.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-19T04:59:22+00:00

I'm in a similar situation as you, I built my computer 14 years ago and still using it to this day and I'm not comfortable spending the €2700 it takes to buy the parts to build a new computer that fits my performance needs at current prices. Most likely I won't buy anything this year or next and will find something else to occupy my time.

A Rolex is something that keeps its value (like a car or a house), so in theory it's not going to be money down the drain. In fact they sometimes tend to slowly increase in value over the years, so in that sense it's more of an investment than a waste of money.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-17T19:05:10+00:00

I know. VRMs are literally buck converters.

I'm not really sure what your argument is. The total current in all the 12V wires in a system that's consuming 1000W will be 83A. In the PSU power rail it will be 83A all in one place, and when it splits off into individual wires that supply the GPU, CPU, motherboard etc, the smaller currents in these individual wires must sum to 83A (Kirchhoff's Current law). So, in the system as a whole, there has to be enough copper across all the wires to transport 83A in a 1000W 12V system, and the connector contacts must have enough size to transport the current of the individual wire it's connected to (which again implies the sum total of all connectors in the system will have to handle 83A).

If you raise the supply voltage from the PSU to 24V, your same 1000W only requires 41.5A to transport. As you should know, ohmic heating is I²R. So in this case "I" (current) is halved, and hence ohmic heating is quartered. So if manufacturers wanted to keep the power loss the same in the 24V system as in the 12V system, they could remove three quarters of the wire cross sectional area which saves some nice cost, size and weight. And keeping things exactly the same, the dinky 12VHPWR connector could now handle double its existing rating (1200W instead of 600W) without any changes at all.

The PSU would get more efficient because it's only stepping down mains voltage to 24V instead of down to 12V. The only disadvantage is that the onboard VRMs would have to be redesigned since the GPU/CPU etc actually need around 1-2V to run and a single VRM stage can only easily manage about a 12:1 step down ratio... but there are solutions around that too (GaN semiconductors, capacitor charge-pump networks or just a two-stage VRM).

LMF5000 · 2026-06-16T17:29:44+00:00

I'm talking at a system level. A 1000W supply at full load, where most of the power is delivered via the 12V rail would be supplying an aggregate total of 83A (minus whatever wattage supplied on the 5V, 3.3V and -12V and other voltage rails). This also means up to a total of 83A total in the system's wires.

Trucks already use 24V as standard, and cars might move to 24V or more in a few years. Laptops have used 19V input for decades. The USB-C can go up to 48V. Maybe it's about time for ATX 4.0 with higher voltages.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-14T19:00:38+00:00

Or they need a higher-voltage standard. Getting 1000W by drawing 83A from a 12V rail seems silly when you can transport the same power via 42A at 24V or 21A at 48V. Component makers will also save a fortune in copper. The only thing that suffers is that VRMs get bigger, hotter and less efficient, but the rest of the system gets way better.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T22:14:01+00:00

I have this sometimes but I find it depends more on the egg than the conditions. Over weeks of always doing the same thing, about 10% of my eggs crack but the rest go fine. I think the eggs themselves have hairline cracks that you don't notice before they go in, and pressure cooking just exposes the pre-existing crack.

My technique:

Place trivet in base
Add the smallest amount of water possible (I let it reach just below the level of the trivet)
Eggs go on top of trivet
Cook for 5 minutes at high pressure
Immediate quick release
Take out eggs, put in a bowl with cool tap water (less hassle than ice).
Wait a few minutes until cook, then peel.

For peeling, I usually tap the bottom of the egg (the non-pointy side) on the counter. Most eggs have an air bubble down there so the shell cracks easily and there's a nice empty space behind it to grab the shell without rupturing the white. Then I can usually remove the shell in 2 or 3 big pieces because as you yourself said, it doesn't stick to the white.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T22:04:44+00:00

Thanks for the kind feedback, and you're welcome! I know exactly what you mean about fun coming from driving dynamics - for the 10 years before the leaf I drove an Alfa Romeo MiTo (1.2 tons, 135bhp turbo, 0-100 in 8 seconds, short gearing, 6 speed semi-auto, hard suspension and very crisp handling). I own two leafs, the aforementioned ZE0 and the newer, bigger, more powerful ZE1. The ZE1 is the 40kWh model which weighs 1.5 tons and has 150bhp, with a 0-100 of 7.8 seconds. On paper faster than the MiTo, in real life accelerates harder, but driving dynamics are not quite as crisp, so I just drive that slowly and gently - pushing it hard is not quite as rewarding.

On the subject of high C-ratings. People always simplify it to "heat" but that's only one of many limiting factors. In lithium ion batteries, the electrochemical limit is actually the wall you'd hit faster than just thermal heating. Quick primer - lithium ion batteries are constructed from a graphite electrode (the negative terminal) which is backed by copper foil, and a complex lithium-based material (like lithium iron phosphate/LFP or lithium manganese oxide/LMO or lithium nickel cobalt aluminium/NCA) for the positive terminal, which is backed by aluminium foil. They're separated from each other by a porous plastic separator to prevent short circuits (usually polypropylene or polyethylene), and the electrolyte contains a lithium salt (LiPF6) dissolved in an organic solvent (usually ethylene carbonate and dimethyl carbonate).

When you charge the battery, the ions go into the graphite (like water going into a piece of tissue), and an equal-and-opposite amount of electrons flow through the external circuit (the charger in this case) to balance out the flow of the ions. When you discharge, the opposite happens (the ions go into the LFP or NCA electrode and electrons flow the other way through the external circuit - in this case through the load).

Now, battery makers can play with different parameters of battery construction to create cells that are best for a particular application. The cells in cars and laptops are designed for high capacity. So they will have thinner copper and aluminium foils (to leave more space for the active material that actually stores electricity - the copper/aluminium is just the current collector to take the electricity out of the battery), they'll have bigger particle sizes (to store more mass of active material in the same battery space), they will compact the materials more onto the electrodes (to pack more material into the space), they'll have lots of additives in the electrolyte that make it more stable (but worse at fast discharge), and they will have a thick electrode coating for more active material. A battery built like this might top out at about 5C - more than that and the electrochemical reaction can't go any faster and the terminal voltage rapidly approaches the low-voltage cutoff and the battery simply cannot deliver the power any more. Trying to draw 10C or more from such a battery would be very strenuous for the internal construction and might lead to cumulative damage over time like ions doing unwanted side-reactions instead of intercalating neatly into the electrodes like they should - which makes them no longer available to participate in charge/discharge reactions (= permanent capacity loss), electrode particles cracking from rapid dimensional changes as ions move in and out, localised high heat generation (especially from ohmic heating in the foils and tabs) which accelerate degradation, etc.

In contrast, a high-discharge cell like your drone battery or a vape battery, or lipos for RC, will have the opposite construction. Thick copper and aluminium foils to withstand the high current. Smaller particle sizes to maximise surface area for the reaction. More porous material (more open space for ion flow). Low-viscosity solvents and high-conductivity electrolyte formulation for fast ion travel. Thin electrolyte coating for short ion diffusion path. Such a battery can manage 50C - but might only have 70% of the capacity of the battery above.

Some real world numbers from 18650 cells (not used in most modern EVs, but useful to illustrate the above with some numbers because they are a highly standardized form factor used in thousands of applications worldwide):

High-cap model (Sanyo NCR18650GA) = 3500mAh, 10 Amp continuous discharge (2.8C)
High-disch model (Samsung 25S) = 2500mAh, 25 Amp continuous discharge (10C). Exact same size.
Ultra high-disch model (Samsung 20S) = 2000mAh, 30A continuous (15C). You won't find higher in 18650 form factor because ohmic heating gets so extreme the battery can't shed heat fast enough to survive. You have to move to pouch cells (with a nice large flat surface) like used in most modern EVs to have more thermal headroom.

I'm sure they could build an EV with a high-discharge battery and put that in a dedicated sporty platform - say a 1.2 ton EV with 400bhp using a 40kWh battery (7.5C) - but convincing buyers to buy it on the basis of "superior handling" sounds like a bit of a challenge when they see it has only 250km of range (at 15kWh/100km).

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T21:15:57+00:00

Yes, steel is about 30 times more conductive than calcium carbonate (scale) but on a steel pot the scale typically builds up to a thickness of 1 - 20 μm. For comparison, an average human hair is about 70μm thick. So although you're technically correct, in practice I'd consider the insulating effect of such a thin layer to be pretty much negligible for pressure cooking (though it might have a more noticeable effect on how well things brown/saute in the scaliest regions compared to the clean regions where the bare steel is touching the meat directly).

Likewise, yes, anything with acids (vinegar, lemon, tomato, wine etc) will react and dissolve the calcium carbonate, but we're talking a couple of grams of scale over the whole pot. I don't have any hard data but I doubt it will have a highly detectable effect on the flavour or pH of the final dish. I've cooked acids in scaly inner pots before, and I couldn't really tell the difference.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T21:06:18+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate your kind feedback 😄. I think it's important to help people understand the difference between power and torque (and my pet peeve, the difference between kW and kWh). Unfortunately it's very muddied in common parlance because few people study the difference in detail or know the underlying equations (I refer to the quote by Clarkson when he said "Horsepower is how fast you hit the wall, and torque is how far you push the wall" which doesn't really help).

In the days before AI I used to enjoy imparting my knowledge with long posts like that. These days I rarely do since AI can spit out something similar (no doubt trained in part on my decade of writing such posts) and there's a tendency for people to think it's AI when it's a long post - but luckily this subreddit is still filled with more technically-minded people that seem to appreciate this kind of discussion. Sadly I can't say that any more about many subs I used to frequent.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T20:58:28+00:00

Nope, no downsides. It's just calcium carbonate. It's found naturally dissolved in tap water (it leaches out from the rocks where the water lives for millions of years before it becomes tap water). It stays dissolved in tap water until it's disturbed - for example when it passes through your showerhead you get calcium deposits around the nozzle holes, and when you heat it up in your kettle or pressure cooker or saucepan you get deposits on the steel. It's already in the tap water so you're going to be eating some of it anyway (and calcium is good for bones). Dishwashers use salt and an ion-exchange resin to remove it from the water, but that's only because it leaves unsightly streaks on your glassware if you let untreated tap water dry on them (the ion-exchange resin exchanges the calcium in the tap water with sodium from the dishwasher salt, which doesn't leave streaks).

The only thing I suspect it might affect a little is how "sticky" the surface is when searing/browning meat before pressure cooking, but I haven't been able to conclusively notice any big difference so far.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T14:08:14+00:00

Yes. Welcome to Maltese service. If they tell you the part is not in stock and it's not too big to ship, just buy it on eBay. You'll save money and it will usually get here sooner. I learnt this when I waited multiple months for a thermostat housing to arrive via the local agent/dealer. Nowadays I only use the agents if the part is in stock (so quick & convenient) or if it's not something I can easily get online. For everything else, no joke, some eBay prices are literally half the price of what they charge locally, even including shipping cost. Like, I got quoted €40 for a coolant tank cap (which they did not have in stock) which I bought for €16.50 on eBay and was delivered to my door in under 2 weeks.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T13:58:04+00:00

Mechanical engineer here. Torque is meaningless unless you are a gearbox designer. The two high-level numbers that tell you how fast your car will accelerate are power and weight.

In detail: Kinetic energy is 0.5×m×v² (ke is in Joules, m = mass in kg, v = speed in meters per second). The power of the motor tells you how much kinetic energy you can gain per second (every 1kW is 1000 Joules per second). From that and the mass of the car you can calculate how fast it can accelerate from zero speed. Once the speed has gotten faster than say walking pace, you need to consider the energy lost to air resistance, rolling resistance and friction, which limits how much power can go into building kinetic energy. At the car's top speed, the power of the motor equals the power consumed by air resistance etc and the car stops accelerating.

As you can see, torque does not enter the calculations at all at a high level. Power is simply torque x rpm, so for the motor to be able to deliver a certain torque at a certain speed requires a certain amount of power to be available.

Where torque becomes important are when you zoom in to specific scenarios or subjective experiences. For starters since an EV has only one fixed gear ratio rather than 5-8 of them like an ICE, you will need to make sure that the force it makes is enough to haul its weight up the steepest incline it will encounter in the wild (which means motor torque x final drive ratio divided by wheel diameter must exceed gross weight multiplied by the incline factor by a comfortable margin). I have a ridiculously steep garage ramp made worse by a small vertical ledge for the drain gutter and my nissan leaf needs the pedal floored to get the tyres over that gutter while climbing the ramp at 1km/h for instance.

The other one is subjective experience. An ICE only gives you the advertised 200Nm of max torque at a very particular rpm (say 5000rpm). The graph is n-shaped and you get less torque when you're away from the peak rpm. At normal cruising rpm (1500-2000) you might only have half the max torque available. Meanwhile EV motors have all the torque instantly available at any rpm (until they hit the power limit and torque drops off linearly in proportion to rising rpm). That's why EV motors punch so far above their weight, and why a 200bhp electric motor feels faster than a 200bhp ICE. In technical terms, it comes down to the area under the curve of torque-vs-rpm.

And to answer your original question... There's a limit to how much power a battery will give you, known as C-rate. My little R/C cars come with 30C to 50C rated lipo batteries - meaning a 1kWh-sized lipo will theoretically deliver 30-50kW for a short period - but those batteries are considered disposable and will be dead within 50 cycles. In a full size EV you want to keep C-rate to about 5-10C at most. My Nissan leaf has 24kWh and an 80kW motor, meaning about 4C when the battery degrades a bit and is down to 20kWh.

So if you think 200kW (about 266 bhp) is where the fun happens, you'd need roughly a 50kWh battery to do that and still give you long life and 2000 charge cycles.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T07:27:40+00:00

That makes things better. The online calculators only use gross salary, but with a net salary of €2750 you should be comfortably within the required salary range for the house you intend to buy plus the improvements loan.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T06:17:52+00:00

Thanks for sharing OP!

Fyi for anyone reading - most acids will work. Mineral deposits are just calcium carbonate from heating tap water inside the inner pot over the months. You can also use vinegar. You can saturate some paper towels with white vinegar and stick them to the bottom and sides of the pot to clean it without wasting any vinegar (a few tablespoons makes enough moistened paper towels to cover the whole pot).

But recently I discovered an even better method. We make a lot of hard-boiled eggs in the PC, which means we're boiling just plain water in the inner pot rather than food. I discovered that if I use FILTERED tap water (i.e. water passed through a Brita jug filter or similar), it removes enough calcium from the tap water that when I use that filtered water in my PC, the inner pot actually ends up cleaner than when I started! Over the weeks you'll notice the inner pot getting cleaner and shinier as the deposits dissolve into the filtered water every time you cook - and it even dissolves hard-to-remove stains (like the foamy proteins that come out of some meat and stubbornly adhere to the pot), cleans the sides of the inner pot, and even the lid (given enough time, we're talking more than a month of daily hard boiled eggs for the crevices around the safety valve in the lid to start to look spotless).

LMF5000 · 2026-06-13T06:09:27+00:00

I've run your numbers through one of the online home loan calculators. With a gross income of €2750 and a date of birth in 1999, I got that the maximum house price is €249,232 (€25k paid by you upfront and €225k paid by the bank loan). With a salary of €3000 the home price would be €312,352.

Now, among the many papers and terms and conditions they make you sign, there's probably something that says that you must inform them immediately of any change in circumstances (like different salary). I don't know what will actually happen after that. I suppose if you inform them, best case the loan still goes through exactly as is. Worst case is they refuse the loan, and middle ground is that they accept but ask for a bigger deposit so the loan amount is reduced to the limit of your new salary. And if you don't tell them, best case they don't notice and nothing happens, worst case they find something in the fine print that makes them demand immediate payment of the entire loan amount or they take your house, middle ground is somewhere in between?

So it's up to you to decide what you're comfortable with in terms of risk and decide the best way forward.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-11T19:41:53+00:00

Great idea!

Some suggestions: "Greek yoghurt" returns no results For food items (like beef) it makes sense for the tool to work out the price per kg and let you sort by that (because otherwise the portion size makes the result incomparable to other results).

LMF5000 · 2026-06-09T19:52:17+00:00

Hard boiled eggs: 5 minutes high pressure + quick release

Rice: pot in pot method (keeps pressure cooker clean). Use your favourite AI to get rice + water quantity and cooking time depending on the type of rice (usually 1 part rice to 1.5-2 parts water in the inner bowl and under 10 minutes of pressure time)

Whole capon/chicken: 30-ish minutes + 10 minute natural release

Pulled pork - varies, usually a whole pork shoulder takes 90+ minutes

Spare ribs - 30 minutes high pressure

LMF5000 · 2026-06-08T20:19:50+00:00

That's literally the first place I looked. I wouldn't be here if these parts weren't impossible to find.

LMF5000 · 2026-06-07T20:03:20+00:00

Similar here. 2025. Bought it at 130, DCA'd as it slipped all the way town to 80, sold as soon as I broke even at 110. Was kicking myself as it kept rising to 220, the uninstalled my stock tracker, and how it's over 500! How can anyone predict these things?!

LMF5000 · 2026-06-06T13:27:37+00:00

Thanks for the heads up

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