Three things Instant Pot does that my older non-electric pressure cookers could not do:
1. Preserve the shape of the food being cooked. The older non-electric cooker would mush all the garbanzo beans or vegetables into a mash. When I cooked with the instant pot for the first time, I thought nothing was cooked fully because every vegetable and bean still were mostly in its original shape.
2. No noise. Non-electric cookers have the steam whistle to vent out excess steam which is noisy and annoying. Instant pot does not have that.
3. It has two pressure settings - lo and high pressure. When I bought it, very few of them offered this option.
Most electric pressure cookers come with a coated aluminum pot. Instant Pot was one of the first ones to offer a stainless steel container. This was the original reason I bought an Instant Pot.
I'm not sure if you are using your regular pressure cooker correctly. Your vegetables should come out similar as if you steamed them. You are probably cooking them too long. The pressure cooker also shouldn't have to vent all the time. At least with my Kuhn Rikkon you have to carefully adjust the temperature to ensure the food is at the right temperature and then very little venting should happen. Of course that also requires constant monitoring and adjusting. But most things only need pressure cooking for 5-10 minutes anyways.
Maybe I was cooking them too long. I used to have a $90 cooker (I think it was T-Fal), but I could never get it to cook correctly. With Instant pot, the cooking time does not seem to matter. Same thing with venting. I could never get it to vent without much noise.
the standard SEB pressure cooker that every household owns in France constantly vents when under pressure - there's a kind of spinning valve on the top that make a choo-choo train noise :)
usually you turn the hob to full until it starts spinning, then you reduce to low for the duration of the cooking
Only once it has reached full pressure. Steam escapes noisily through the lid locking mechanism for about a minute first (escaping steam is used to engage the mechanism, which makes it fail-safe because without the mechanism engaged it will never reach full pressure).
>It has two pressure settings
Only on the more expensive model. Cheaper version only has the higher pressure mode. But I have the cheaper version and I have never wanted a low pressure mode. It seems redundant because it already has slow cooking mode.
1 I have seen the steam escape for the lid to lock, but I would not categorize that as a noisy escape. But my perception may have been colored by my previous experiences.
2. True. But the difference when I bought it was around 25 dollars, so it seemed a worthwhile investment. I have used the low pressure to cook rice for some dishes which require the rice to be hard but cooked. I could do it in slow cooker mode, but it would take a long time.
1. Preserve the shape of the food being cooked. The older non-electric cooker would mush all the garbanzo beans or vegetables into a mash. When I cooked with the instant pot for the first time, I thought nothing was cooked fully because every vegetable and bean still were mostly in its original shape.
2. No noise. Non-electric cookers have the steam whistle to vent out excess steam which is noisy and annoying. Instant pot does not have that.
3. It has two pressure settings - lo and high pressure. When I bought it, very few of them offered this option.
Most electric pressure cookers come with a coated aluminum pot. Instant Pot was one of the first ones to offer a stainless steel container. This was the original reason I bought an Instant Pot.