Cookers
Buy and sell cookers in Costa Rica.
A pot of black beans that ties up the stove for most of an afternoon is done in under an hour in a pressure cooker, and that saving is why so many Costa Rican kitchens keep one on the shelf. Beside the stovetop pressure cooker come its electric relatives: multi-cookers such as the Instant Pot or Oster models, rice cookers sized in cups, and slow cookers for a beef stew left to simmer through the morning. Each kind can be listed new in the box or second-hand, and the few parts that decide whether a used one is worth having take minutes to check.
The pressure cooker on the stove and the one that plugs in:
the stovetop pot is a heavy pan with a locking lid, a rubber gasket and a weighted valve that hisses once it is up to pressure. Apart from the rubber and the valve there is nothing in it to break. Aluminium ones from Presto or Telstar are light and cheap and dent if dropped; stainless steel is heavier and is the kind that works on an induction top. An electric pressure cooker trades some of that speed for a timer and a keep-warm setting, so the beans can be left while you go out. Most also brown, steam and cook rice, which is why Instant Pot, Oster, Midea and Ninja call them multi-cookers. A Ninja Foodi with a crisping lid is half air fryer; if you would rather keep the jobs apart, air fryers and deep fryers sit next door.
Black beans in Coronado and Puntarenas:
water boils below 100 °C up in the Central Valley, so beans and stewing beef in an open pot take longer the higher you live. A pressure cooker pushes the boiling point back up, which is why the time it saves is greatest in Coronado, Zarcero or the hills above Heredia and smaller at sea level.
Why a rice cooker is sized in cups and a slow cooker in litres:
the cups on a rice cooker box count the small measuring cup packed inside, filled with uncooked rice, and rice swells to two or three times that, so a five- or six-cup model feeds most families. A slow cooker is a stoneware crock in a heated shell, built for hours on low: a tough cut for beef stew, or beans started before work. Either way, cooked beans end up in one of the blenders and juicers on their way to becoming mashed black beans.
Where the money sits in a used pressure cooker:
a stovetop pressure cooker costs from about ₡20,000 to ₡45,000 new, and an electric multi-cooker from about ₡50,000 to ₡100,000, more at the Ninja and Cuisinart end. On an electric model the expensive part is the base, with its element and controls, and it either works or it does not; what wears out is the sealing ring and the small cap on the float valve, both cheap spares. Rice cookers and slow cookers cost so little new that a used one is only worth collecting at a giveaway price, and only with a perfect pot.
Where a used cooker gives out first:
on a stovetop pressure cooker, the gasket. Pull it out of the lid: it should be soft and lie flat, with no cracks or hardened stretches. Check that the vent pipe is clear, the safety plug is still in the lid and the handles lock without forcing. On an electric one, a stretched ring lets steam out around the lid, and a ring that smells of last month’s garlic is only silicone holding onto odour; a new ring fixes both. The rim of the inner pot must not be bent, because a bent rim never seals. Run it with a little water and the float valve should rise with no steam escaping at the edge. Stand a rice cooker’s inner pot on a table. If it rocks, it is warped, sits badly on the hot plate and burns the bottom layer. On a slow cooker, run a finger round the base of the crock: a hairline crack there ends the deal.
A cooker ad that answers the gasket question:
photograph the inner pot in daylight, the underside of the lid with ring and valve in place, and the rating plate. Give the capacity, say whether a stovetop pot is aluminium or stainless and how old the ring is, and list the steaming rack, measuring cup and any spare ring. Plenty of these come from kitchens that were given a multi-cooker and went on cooking beans in the old aluminium pressure cooker, so if yours has barely been used, put that in the first line.