****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Update 8/16/2014Changing my review from three to four stars. Based on performance alone, I give this device five stars. The reason I hold back on the five star rating is due to an error in the instructions, which was the cause of the problems I recounted in my original review. Regarding the delay timer, my instruction booklet reads (all caps are mine):"(d) Using the 'hour' and 'minute' keys, set the clock to the desired time to BEGIN cooking..."After submitting my review here, VitaClay customer service very kindly informed me that the delay timer should be set for the time I want the dish to be finished.Armed with this new information, cooking oatmeal this morning resulted in breakfast finishing cooking at the correct time, and my pot cleaned up much easier than in my previous attempts. Yay!So, kudos to VitaClay customer service for staying on top of their reviews on Amazon and providing helpful information in a timely manner! And thank you for making a wonderful product. My obvious suggestion is to correct (and improve) the instruction booklet, and with that we'll have a five star rating! (When I say improve, I am referring to my initial impression when first reading the booklet. Some of the writing seemed a bit disjointed and not entirely clear, as if some parts were written by a less skilled writer, while other parts made perfect sense.)--------------Original Review:I've had this cooker for about six months now, and I have mixed feelings about it. I have no problems with how well it cooks the food. The issues I have are:1. Clean-up seems to be more difficult than advertised and explained in the instruction booklet in the case of cooking oatmeal. This could well be user error, though I can't figure out what it is I am doing wrong. I just know that on more than one or two occasions, I've had to clean the pot multiple times using the method of "cooking" a mixture of baking soda, vinegar and water. To be clear, to get the pot clean after cooking a batch of oatmeal, I have to repeat this step two or three times before I can loosen all the cooked-on oatmeal. This is hardly convenient and uses two to four times as much electricity as should be needed to cook some oatmeal. As a consequence, I don't use the VitaClay for cooking oatmeal as much as I'd like.2. By far the most annoying bug my VitaClay cooker has is the unreliability of it's delay start feature. Sometimes it works absolutely as expected, sometimes it partially works (the cooking begins an hour earlier than programmed), and most recently, it simply doesn't work. Each time it appears not to work, I go re-read the instruction booklet to see whether I've forgotten something, but no, it's simply not working. For example, yesterday I wanted to delay the cook start time for a few hours. I followed the steps as described in the booklet, and each time, the cooker simply began cooking instead. My delay start ended up being me rearranging my afternoon plans so that I could get home at the right time to start the device myself. I find that far less useful than using my traditional slow cooker.
