, which can take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours on the stovetop, can be done in 10 to 20 minutes in a pressure cooker. It's an incredibly powerful tool, with jaw-dropping results. You can literally get home from work and have aon the dinner table in an hour from start to finish, something that is impossible with more conventional cooking methods.
This is true of all the other preset pressure-cooking modes as well. Variations in recipes, in ingredients, in local conditions, and in your desired results will all play into the time, pressure, and temperature levels you choose; often the recipe itself will be the best guide for what settings to choose.
What this means is that if you live and die by the presets, you really only know how to cook with the specific model of multi-cooker you've grown familiar with. Buy a new multi-cooker one day, and you'll have to relearn its preset quirks all over again. Using the manual mode means you're more clued in to what pressures and times the cooker is actually using, parameters that are more consistent across models and brands.
There's no reason not to use this setting, except that you can just as easily steam foods in a pot or You can make it work by searing ingredients in very small batches, and by waiting longer for trapped moisture to cook off and true searing to begin, but it's certainly not the strong point of any multi-cooker I've ever used. It's fine for making a stew or braise from start to finish all in the same multi-cooker pot, but I'd never use a multi-cooker to sear foods that don't otherwise require being in the multi-cooker.
I don’t get it. Get a Dutch oven for like $30 and use it on your stove or oven that you already have.