As a working (soon-to-be) mom with limited counter space, I’m always on the hunt for the perfect one-pot meal. But having to baby the stockpot or Dutch oven to ensure each ingredient is behaving the way it’s supposed to tends to make meal prepping a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Enter: Our Place’s new Dream Cooker, launched Oct. 10, which is quite literally a dream to use.
The slow cooker and pressure cooker with a sauté and keep-warm setting retails for $250 ($225 if you’re shopping the current Black Friday sale!) and is available in four chic matte colorways from the Blue Salt that pairs swimmingly with my teal dining room chairs to the Spice that adds some flare to bland-looking countertops. Here’s exactly what I thought of the appliance and if it might be a worthy investment for your kitchen.
This multicooker relies on a bare-bones interface to take the guesswork out of cooking. It features a 6-quart capacity inner pot, a locking lid and cool-to-the-touch basin for added safety, automatic steam release, four simple settings and a nontoxic nonstick ceramic coating we know and love from the brand’s Always Pan.
What we liked about it
Whereas most slow cookers and pressure cookers rely on dozens of settings to make you feel like you’re getting your bang for your buck or being extra productive in the kitchen, the Dream Cooker takes you back to basics. It features a super-minimalist aesthetic and functionality that prevents that dreaded decision fatigue (“Should I be roasting or baking this turkey for best results?”). Choosing your preferred cook time feels as simple as using a microwave, and you can always adjust it mid-cook if your chef instincts are telling you it needs more time.
Cooking for my husband, a chef with fine-dining experience, incites tons of performance anxiety. When I tell you I used the Dream Cooker to make the best risotto either of us have ever tried, I am not being dramatic. I had low expectations — I know just how ambitious a recipe risotto can be — but after 30 minutes on the high heat pressure-cook setting, we had transported ourselves to a bistro in Rome. And it took no more than the click of a button and some basic ingredients in my fridge. The porcini-infused arborio rice mixed with a selection of chopped veggies, broth and herbs created a dreamy consistency that I credit entirely to the Dream Cooker.
The issue with cooking all ingredients at once is that they tend to get, quite literally, lost in the sauce. Instead of searing meats and veggies in a separate pan to release their flavors before adding them to the main event, I can complete that step right in the Dream Cooker on the sauté mode before adding in the rest of my ingredients. This makes a profound difference in the complexity of flavor not only because it adds some much-needed crunch and sear to certain ingredients but because it coats the pan with their flavors to create depth and richness.
I’m the type of home chef to stray away from recipes — I prefer to use what’s in my pantry in the quantities I prefer (I’m looking at you, several cloves of garlic and an unhinged amount of tomato sauce) — so I appreciate how this multicooker promotes creativity. While there’s no shortage of slow cooker or pressure cooker recipes on the internet, or courtesy of the brand itself from black bean soup to green chili pork, the device is something many of us have not yet seen or interacted with. Unlike a one-pot meal that requires occasional stirring or tinkering, the Dream Cooker wants you to be confident about your ingredients, quantities and cook times going in and trust they’ll come out chef approved. Most of the time, they do.
What we didn’t like about it
Though the pressure-cook function exceeded my expectations, the slow cooker setting left lots to be desired. I set the slow cooker for 1.5 hours on medium heat to make a Bolognese sauce, hoping the flavors and textures of ground meat, mirepoix veggies and stewed tomatoes would fuse as well as those from the risotto. When the time was up, the carrots and celery were still far too crunchy to be considered part of a sauce, forcing me to tack on another 30 minutes on high heat just to pick up some slack. (I’ve made more tender concoctions on similar heat levels in a standard stockpot, which suggests this fancy device isn’t for everyone or all occasions.)
The sauce itself had no dimension despite using flavorful add-ons like chicken stock, Worcestershire and mixed fine herbs. Even with another half hour on high heat, the sauce remained lukewarm at best, giving new meaning to the term, as the kids say, “weak sauce.” This leads me to believe that the Dream Cooker slow cooks best over the course of several hours (the function goes up to a total of 12 hours versus two hours max on pressure cook). If you plan on a shorter cook time of under two hours, the pressure-cook setting is your best bet. Or there’s always that massive stockpot you inherited from your grandmother that seems to get the job done just fine.
Accomplished cooks with a baseline understanding of how certain ingredients cook at what temperatures and speeds might be able to venture into Dream Cooker territory confidently. If you’re new to this (i.e. have only recently vowed to cut back on DoorDash), you’ll be going in blind. I appreciate the minimalist low, medium and high heat settings, but these guidelines might be too vague for someone who needs more guidance and tends to prefer specific temperature controls associated with, say, an oven. After all, certain proteins require they reach a particular inner temperature to be considered safe to eat, which will force you to go into the Dream Cooker with your meat thermometer before your cooking time is up, potentially causing you to burn your hand and release some precious steam from the device. So, my critique about the temperature is as much about flavor as it is about food safety.
While I understand reaching high heat requires time, I’m a little bit jaded and wasn’t prepared to wait around 15 minutes for the Dream Cooker to preheat for both the pressure-cook and sauté settings. The extended preheat, coupled with the disappointing slow cook time, sits in stark contrast to the brand’s claim that the multicooker is an exorbitantly faster option than other cooking methods. If speed is your goal, this isn’t for you. If low and slow works well with your schedule (after all, this method will produce the best fall-off-the-bone results), the Dream Cooker is an absolute worthy addition to your kitchen gadget arsenal.
Bottom line
If you already own a slow cooker or pressure cooker, save your money and invest in another one of Our Place’s Underscored-approved finds from its Always Pan 2.0 to its Instagrammable tableware. If you’re building your kitchen tool collection from scratch (just like those delectable recipes you’re about to attempt), you can’t go wrong with the Dream Cooker as a set-it-and-forget-it solution to all your meal prep needs and beyond.
