Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker Review
A great pressure cooker, and a whole lot more, for a solid price
Verdict
The Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker is a great performing multi-cooker for a reasonable price. It’s sturdy, offers a lot of useful functions and is easy to use. Results were solid, especially when used as a steamer and slow cooker. Just watch out for its slow preheat time.
Pros
- Sturdy build quality
- Excellent results across a variety of modes
- Convenient accessories
Cons
- Slower preheat time
Key Features
- 5.7 litre capacity:The 5.7L capacity that Cosori’s pressure cooker offers makes it an ideal choice for medium-sized families who want to cook a lot in one go.
- 12 cooking functions:It also has a total of 12 cooking functions with modes such as Saute, Slow Cook and Pressure Cook, as well as a Keep Warm mode.
Introduction
Cosori’s 5.7L Pressure Cooker isn’t the brand’s first pressure cooker, with a previous release a number of years ago.
However, this new version adds a different set of nine functions into the mix, while coming in at quite a reasonable price compared to competitors, including the Ninja Speedi and the Ninja OL650UKDBCP at £99.99/$89.99.
I’ve been testing Cosori’s pressure cooker for the past few weeks to see how well it performs. Let’s take a closer look.
Design and features
- Sturdy build quality
- Large-capacity cooking pot
- Lots of presets for cooking
The Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker opts for an entirely mirrored finish around the sides, deviating from the brand’s usual black colouring as is found on their range of air fryers, including the excellent 6L TurboBlaze I tested late last year.
It’s a good-looking appliance, and while it is slightly larger in capacity than the company’s rice cooker (5.7 litres), it remains reasonably compact on a countertop. The inner pot’s capacity is a good size for fitting a large joint of meat or a range of different vegetables, for instance, when cooking a meal for a medium-sized family.
The lid twists off at the top and comes with a handle to make this process easier, and, like other pressure cookers, the Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker features a pressure release valve toggle on the right-hand side that’s handily signposted in bright orange. Cosori’s pressure cooker also features a legible display, with dedicated buttons for each cooking function, as well as for selecting the desired low or high for temperature and corresponding time.
The Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker has 12 cooking functions, split between designated modes such as Pressure Cook and Steam and specific modes for different types of food, including oatmeal, meat, and cakes. It’s certainly versatile.
With those dedicated programs, the pressure cooker is easy to operate. Tap a function, and it’ll provide a preset time that can be adjusted with the plus and minus buttons. You can also configure the pressure level on certain functions and set the temperature. While not a dedicated function, the Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker also has a Keep Warm function which can keep your food warm for up to 12 hours.
As well as offering control over your cooking and a good choice of functions, you also get a handy amount of accessories with the pressure cooker. These include a ladle and spatula, a metal trivet for placing food when pressure cooking, and a measuring cup. As with other Cosori appliances, you also get a recipe book to provide you with some inspiration for getting started, as well as some guidance sheets for performing a test run to get the appliance reading for cooking.
The inner pot of the pressure cooker is also dishwasher-safe if you don’t want to handwash it, which is handy. The trivet wipes clean easily enough, too. Hand washing the inner pot is also easy.
Performance
- Works well as a pressure cooker
- Also a top performing steamer and slow cooker
- Long preheat time on all modes
Over my time with the Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker, I tried a variety of food inside, including meat and vegetables, as well as porridge and salmon, to best gauge how well it cooks as a pressure cooker on its own and with its other functions.
As seems to be customary with the appliances I test, I cooked a 1.5kg gammon joint on the Pressure Cook setting in 400ml of water, with the joint being placed on the trivet. It took an hour to cook, and while the gammon itself cooked well, retaining a lot of flavour and moisture, the crackling on top wasn’t crisp, so had to be air-fried afterwards.
With three Chicken Breasts cooked on the Meat/Poultry setting, they cooked well in around 15 minutes, although were perhaps a little overcooked because of misjudged timings. That’s not the pressure cooker’s fault, though. Utilising the Steam function for three salmon fillets marinated in lemon juice and topped with black pepper turned out to be a great success with the salmon retaining a lot of flavour and a lot more moisture than when cooked elsewhere. Of course, it wasn’t as crisp as when I’d air-fried it in the past, but it arguably had more flavour and cooked in less time, taking just five minutes.
A big test for the Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker was cooking a beef stew, which involved sauteing the diced beef in sections using the pressure cooker’s Saute function, before placing it back into the pan with onions, powdered California garlic, two tins of chopped tomatoes, passata, chopped mushrooms, stock and plum tomatoes, as well as a good helping of Worcestershire sauce. This was left to cook for six hours on Slow Cook. When it came out, the sauce wasn’t runny and the meat fell apart. It also remained consistently good after being kept warm for 45 minutes, too.
I cooked some porridge the following morning on the pressure cooker’s respective Porridge/Oatmeal setting, choosing to adopt the same measurements as the recipe book called for. It came out after just three minutes and was piping hot, with the right consistency.
As well as using the Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker as the main cooking implement for a few weeks, I also used it to help along processes traditionally executed elsewhere. For instance, I used it to hasten the process of making mashed colcannon potato by pressure cooking some potatoes and savoy cabbage on high pressure for eight minutes. It softened the potatoes and cabbage down to the correct level, and once I’d added some milk and mustard to the proceedings and mashed it to the right level, it made for some of the best mash I’ve ever had.
The Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker doesn’t make much noise when cooking in a general sense, although when using pressurised modes, you will have to watch out for the large streams of water vapour that come out of the top. Moreover, this appliance is quite slow to preheat, as much as it may cook food in a reasonably brisk manner. For the likes of the salmon and the porridge, it took well in excess of 10 minutes to preheat, although it will take less time after you’ve cooked something else first if you’re using it to cook multiple items in a row.
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Should you buy it?
You want a variety of useful functions
The Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker offers a range of convenient and actually useful cooking functions for most people, and if you want a good variety, this is an excellent machine.
You want a quick preheat
Cosori’s 5.7L Pressure Cooker cooks a range of food well, although its slow preheat time means it isn’t as brisk as the competition overall.
Final Thoughts
The Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker is a great performing multi-cooker for a reasonable price, all things considered. It’s sturdy, offers a lot of useful functions and is easy to use. Results overall were solid, especially when used as a steamer and slow cooker. Just watch out for its slower preheat time.
It’s especially on that slower preheat where the Ninja Speedi wins out at a higher price, delivering complete meals in 15 minutes or less. However, it is more expensive, as are some of Ninja’s bigger multi cookers that are more comparable to Cosori’s. The 5.7L Pressure Cooker remains an excellent option that’s well-priced and a good performer, even if it is a little slow.
How we test
We test every pressure cooker we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main multi-cooker for the review period
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FAQs
The Cosori 5.7L Pressure Cooker has a total of 12 cooking modes, as well as a Keep Warm mode, too.
Full specs
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
