Academic & Business Writing - Final Assignment Draft
I am doing a review of the Itaki steamer
The Itaki Steamer is a portable device designed with the everyday worker in mind. It totes the features of single serving cooking, easy portability, the ability to cook from your desk without interfering with your work and healthy meals. It comes with an online recipe book, an egg cooker attachment and a small muslin bag to carry it around in. The outer shell is in two parts, the top clicking/latching onto the bottom. The inside contains 2 metal bowls; a large one for the bottom and a smaller one to sit atop the larger, and a plastic lid. It also came with a small measuring cup and an egg cooker. For my review I filled it with the contents of my favourite dish - Japanese Chicken Curry. I carried it on my nightly walk, put it in the fridge to stimulate it being "at the office until cooking time" and cooked it in my kitchen.
The first issue I ran into with my Itaki was it was not 100%. The top part of the outer shell did not latch properly. One side is broken. Which means that the contents of the food could easily fall out. If not for the muslin bag, I would have no means of carrying it. The muslin bag, however, did not prevent it from being jostled whilst in my backpack. Your options are to either fill the Itaki and take it en route or to pre-package your food in tupperware before going to work. The latter taking up more space and being more inconvenient.
The lack of recipes is also a big hinderance. If you're making meals you've done on your stove previously, it is more difficult to get the ratios correct for single serving cooking and there is virtually no real guideline to help you. That aside I put 1 cut up chicken breast, 1 cup cut up carrot and 1/2 cup cut up onion in the bottom. I also added 1 cube curry and 1 Itaki cup of water. In the top I put rice and water. When it came time to cooking I plugged it in. With no reference to how long it would actually take I went off of the guideline of how long it said it would take to cook meat as that was longer than cooking rice according to its guideline. Unfortunately it took 15 minutes longer than anticipated along with another addition of water in the bottom to assure proper cooking.
Parts of the dish cooked well while others did not. My white rice cooked fine, but the sprouted grain rice I often mixed with white rice did not. My chicken, veggies and curry cooked well, but I ended up with too much water and runny curry. Overall though, the dish was quite tasty and very healthy. You could taste the difference steaming made vs frying the majority of the dish in a pan.
While the Itaki has some major flaws - presenting more to transport to/from work, being broken upon buying and adding a large learning curve - I find it to be a cute accessory that would more likely be beneficial to students as opposed to the office worker. Largely due to lack of cooking utensils in a dorm room. I give it 1 thumb up, 1 thumb sideways.
