Cookers
Buy and sell cookers in Panama.
The free-range hen that gives a Panamanian sancocho its flavour is also why so many kitchens own an electric pressure cooker: that bird stays tough for hours in an open pot and comes out tender in well under one with the lid locked. Dried beans, lentils and pigeon peas get the same treatment. Slow cookers do the opposite job, holding a flank steak just below a simmer all afternoon until it pulls apart into shredded beef, and rice cookers sit alongside both. Boxed new pots come up next to used ones, and the used ones often leave homes where a multicooker has made the single-purpose pot redundant.
A locked lid, a ceramic crock or a rice thermostat:
the three pots cook in opposite ways. An electric pressure cooker seals its lid and traps the steam, raising the boiling point so tough cuts and dried legumes cook in a fraction of the time. Most of them are multicookers in the Instant Pot mould, adding sauté, slow cook, steam, yogurt and a rice button; the Ninja Foodi and Instant Pot Duo Crisp add an air-fry lid too, overlapping with the drawer models in air fryers and deep fryers. A slow cooker is the reverse: a heavy glazed crock in a heated housing, with Low, High and Warm on the dial and no pressure at all, mostly from Crock-Pot and Hamilton Beach. A rice cooker has one job and a thermostat that clicks over to warm once the water is gone.
Litres and the inner pot on a multicooker:
size up more than you think. Three litres suits one or two people and around six a family, but a pressure cooker can only be filled two-thirds of the way, and half for beans, which foam. A stainless steel pot takes a metal spoon and outlasts the machine; the nonstick pots common on value brands release rice easily but scratch, and once the coating flakes the pot has to be replaced. Check that spare rings and inner pots are sold for the brand before you choose it: easy for an Instant Pot, often impossible for an unknown label. Stainless also matters if you purée in the pot: a stick blender from blenders and juicers turns lentils smooth in a steel pot, but its blades will score a nonstick one.
Why the inner pot sets the value of a used multicooker:
a value-brand multicooker runs about $55 to $70 new and an Instant Pot or a digital Black+Decker around $100 to $120. With new ones that cheap, a used value-brand pot has to go for very little, and its nonstick pot is usually the first part to fail. A used Instant Pot is the better find. The part that wears, the silicone ring, is a cheap spare, so what you are paying for is the stainless pot, the lid and the electronics, and a complete one with a fresh ring is fair at around $40 to $60.
Where a used pressure cooker or slow cooker gives itself away:
at the sealing ring in a pressure cooker’s lid, so pull it out and look at it. Cuts, a stretched or wavy ring, or one that still smells of last month’s curry all mean a replacement. The float valve should slide freely with its small silicone cap underneath, and the rim of the inner pot should be round, not dented. Then ask to see it run with a little water: it should seal, the valve should rise, no steam should escape round the lid and the countdown should start. On a slow cooker, lift the crock out and check the base and sides for hairline cracks and crazed glaze, since a cracked crock can split as it heats. On a rice cooker, look at the coating and the base of the pot, because a dented one sits unevenly on the hot plate and cooks unevenly.
Spare rings, the steam rack and a clip of it reaching pressure:
those make a multicooker listing believable. Put the brand, the litres and whether the inner pot is stainless or nonstick in the title, say when the ring was last changed, and include any spare along with the steam rack and condensation cup. Photograph the underside of the lid with the ring seated and the inside of the pot; a short video of the float valve rising and the timer starting shows it still seals. For a slow cooker, show the crock out of its housing. Give the exact model as well, so a buyer in Chitré can find out before setting off whether rings for it are still sold, because a pressure cooker that can no longer seal is only a slow cooker.