In this review, I’ll give you my thoughts – as a pretty experienced home cook who’s nonetheless quite new to pressure cooking – about the WMF Perfect Plus, a high-end German-made pressure cooker that I’ve been using for the last few days.
I’ve cooked a potful of dried beans, a chicken soup, a lamb curry, and a chicken & rice dish so far, and I’ve got enough of an idea of its features to help you if you’re considering this model.
So here are my thoughts:
- It’s well made – The weight, finish and features live up to the high price tag
- It’s about the right size for 3-4 people – I had another cooker before, which actually came with two pots, a 4 litre and a 7 litre. I used the 4 litre nearly all the time, the 7 litre being just too big for us (family of four)
- The mechanism is excellent – What I really appreciate is the simple system for showing you whether you’re “at pressure” or not. See that photo above? See the one visible red ring on the blue top part? That shows it is at “low pressure” (that is, pressurised, but at the lower of two settings – actually, it was off the heat and naturally de-pressurising from high pressure when I took the pic). Two red rings means high pressure. With my other cheaper cooker, it was just guesswork! (That cooker was a BRA Tekna, pictured below, which I wouldn’t recommend.)
This is the BRA Tekna, my previous cooker – It’s got an innovative lid design, but it’s hard to know whether it’s reached pressure or not, which I ended up really disliking.
So, continuing with my thoughts on the WMF Perfect Plus:
- It is easy to clean – You can remove the plastic handle/mechanism completely from the lid, and then the lid and main pot can be easily washed or presumably put in the dishwasher
- The spares are easy to get – At least, they are in Europe, as all are listed on Amazon
- It’s easy to “de-pressure” – You can leave it to de-pressure naturally, do it fast (by pulling the slider on the handle back fully), or do it somewhere in-between, which is useful
I’ve found pressure cooking to be a skill (it’s weird to not be able to see your food when it’s cooking, and you need to trust the short timings!), and I’ve had my fair share of failures – failing to get to pressure, for instance. One of the big things you have to learn is what is and isn’t likely to work in in it.
But I find the main risk is burning your food to the bottom of the cooker as you get it up to pressure. So a cooker that reliably tells you when it’s up to pressure and that has a heavy base, therefore that more evenly distributes the heat, is for me necessary. The WMF Perfect Plus 3.5 litre does both, well.
By the way, If you’re new to pressure cooking, I firmly recommend Catherine Phipps’s book, “Modern Pressure Cooking”. She’s a cook first, and a pressure cooker enthusiast second, so the meals are good. Plus, working through the book will give you get a firm grasp on the nature of cooking this way.
That’s the book I’ve been using. For the past couple of months I’ve been pressure cooking 4-5 times a week, but finding the right cooker has made a world of difference.
So yes, I do recommend the WMF Perfect Plus. But whatever brand you go for, I’d also recommend spending as much as you can afford. In my experience so far with a relatively cheap cooker and an undeniably expensive one, the expensive one is more trustworthy, reliable and easy to use, and has produced better results.
By the way, the reason I chose a stove-top cooker over an electric counter-top one is a mix of purism (I like single-job cooking kit), lack of counter space, and wanting to understand/properly control what is going on with it, in order to achieve mastery without just pressing a button and letting it do its thing. As a “hands-on” cook, this appeals to me more than a computerised gizmo.