Best and Worst Appliances for Mexican Cooking in Canada

A Canadian kitchen is more likely than a Mexican one to come stocked with a slow cooker, a pressure cooker and an air fryer, simply because of what sells locally and what shows up at Boxing Day sales. All three are genuinely useful for Mexican cooking — but only if you understand what each one physically cannot do, because using the wrong appliance for the wrong step is exactly what produces the flat, "boiled-tasting" version of a dish that should be deep and complex.

Pressure cooker: the single best upgrade for beans, pozole and birria. A pressure cooker traps steam to raise internal pressure above normal atmospheric pressure, and that raised pressure pushes water's boiling point up with it — a standard pressure cooker running at roughly 15 psi (about 1 bar of gauge pressure) brings water to approximately 121 °C (250 °F), well above the 100 °C ceiling of an open pot at sea level, and further above it still at Canadian altitude cities like Calgary, where the open-pot boiling point is already reduced. That extra heat and pressure is exactly what dried beans, hominy for pozole, and tough braising cuts for birria or barbacoa need to break down collagen and soften properly in a fraction of the time an open pot takes. For anyone in Canada without easy access to a wood-fired pit or hours to babysit a pot, a pressure cooker is arguably the most useful single appliance for Mexican staples that traditionally take all day.

Slow cooker: genuinely good, but only for the second half of the job. A slow cooker's heating element holds food in roughly a 79–93 °C (174–199 °F) range — hot enough to gently break down tough cuts over many hours, which is real and useful for birria, carnitas or a braised mole base. But that temperature range sits entirely below the 140–165 °C (280–330 °F) window where the Maillard reaction — the browning chemistry between amino acids and sugars that produces the deep, roasted, savoury flavour in a good mole, a properly seared carnitas exterior, or well-toasted dried chiles — actually happens. A slow cooker physically cannot brown anything, no matter how long you run it. This is not a matter of technique or patience; it's outside the temperature range the appliance is built to reach. The practical consequence: any Mexican dish put into a slow cooker without first searing the meat in a hot pan and toasting/frying the chiles, garlic and onions for a mole or adobo base will taste noticeably flatter and more "boiled" than the same dish made with those browning steps done first, on the stovetop, before the slow cooker ever gets involved. The slow cooker is the right tool for the long, low, tenderizing hours — it is the wrong tool, structurally, for the flavour-building step that has to happen before or after it.

Air fryer: closer to a small convection oven than to actual frying. An air fryer works by circulating high-speed hot air, at typical operating temperatures up to around 200 °C (392 °F), around food coated in a thin layer of oil — hot enough, unlike a slow cooker, to sit right in the Maillard browning range and genuinely brown and crisp food, not just warm it. This makes it a legitimately good tool for things that want a crisp, blistered or fried-adjacent exterior with a fraction of the oil: tostadas, chips, flautas, taquitos, or crisping the edges of leftover tortillas for chilaquiles. It is not, mechanically, a deep fryer — food isn't submerged, so anything relying on full oil immersion for even cooking (a proper carnitas confit, deep-fried churros) won't come out the same way, and that gap is worth naming rather than pretending an air fryer is a drop-in replacement for a pot of hot oil.

What genuinely hurts the result: reheating tortillas dry in a microwave. A microwave heats water molecules directly and very unevenly at the scale of a tortilla, and without added moisture it drives what little water is left in the tortilla out fast and unevenly, producing the rubbery, tough, sometimes leathery texture most people associate with microwaved tortillas. (Wrapping tortillas in a damp paper towel before microwaving reintroduces some of that lost moisture and genuinely helps — it's specifically the dry microwave reheat that goes wrong.) A dry comal, skillet, or even a few seconds directly over a gas flame reheats a tortilla far more evenly and, per the staling chemistry covered in our freezing piece, briefly re-softens the starch structure the way a microwave's uneven, fast heating does not.

The pattern across all four: each appliance is defined by a temperature ceiling or a heat-transfer mechanism, and matching the appliance to the step that mechanism actually supports — rather than treating any single appliance as a one-stop replacement for a whole recipe — is what separates a genuinely good result from a technically-finished-but-flat one.