Her pressure cooker appears to be off brand. I would only trust Instant Pot. Anything else cheaper, you’re asking for trouble.
I find it funny that you would only trust Instant Pot. Pressure cookers have been around for 100 years and took off after the 1939 World’s Fair. Instant Pot is the newcomer and is a Chinese-designed product. This shows how far Chinese products have come!
In 2008, Robert Wang, Yi Quin, and one other friend, all former employees of Nortel in Ottawa, Canada, started working on designs for the Instant Pot. Wang is credited as the inventor of the Instant Pot. Wang and four partners founded Double Insight Inc in 2009. Instant Pots are manufactured by the Midea Group in GuangDong, China.
Wang has a PhD in computer science with a specialty in artificial intelligence. Rather amazing going from a PhD in CS and AI to telecommunications to founding a successful pressure cooker company! That’s a great story right there.
I have been using pressure cookers all of my life. I love them. They take a tiny bit of common sense. I actually had the exact Electric Presto models shown in the picture, but the nonstick finish started flaking off the very first time I used it. So I took it back. Presto has been around a lot longer than Instant Pot. I have had one of their uncoated completely manual aluminum models for decades.
I purchased a larger automatic electric models from Costco a couple of years ago; it is also not an Instant Pot. It has been fine and is almost foolproof as well. I think that the problem with automatic units, if you want to call it a problem, is that they kind of “insulate” one from the actual process that is taking place.
I am extremely skeptical of the sequence of events told by the unfortunate lady. The identical Presto electric pressure cooker that I owned had both the blue pressure indicator that she mentioned, a pressure relief valve, and a lock that if you had screwed the top all the way on, would not allow you to take it off until the pressure was released. She had to do several things wrong to get hot soup all over herself.
It is impossible to make anything completely idiot proof. How many people have managed to take the door off their microwave, tape the safety switch down, turn it on and then stick their head inside the open compartment to make sure it was actually working? We will probably never know.
Maybe she should have asked the Boston Marathon guys for which ones they endorse.