Counterpoint, we were gifted an instant pot and used it about half a dozen times before realizing it was an extra piece of kitchen equipment that did absolutely nothing for us in terms of food quality or ease of cooking. It sat in the back of a deep cupboard for a couple of years until we threw it away when we moved.
It's a tool. What you get out of it will depend on what you expect of it. What I try to tell people is that Instant Pot is not something that makes food better nor does it necessarily cook things faster. When you factor in the time it takes to get up to pressure and the time it takes for it release it, it isn't necessarily faster than normal cooking.
What is does do it take care of itself. In other words, I can throw a bunch of stuff in the pot, configure it for cook time then turn off the heat, set a timer and know that in 45 minutes it will be ready to serve. In a house hold where multitasking is a necessity, that is a huge boon. Finally, one pot to clean up.
There is also the pressure cooker option. That's where our household gets the most mileage out of it. Pressure cooking is easy. Instant Pot pressure cooking is automagic.
Pressure cooking itself is magical but the InstantPot is like a level one mage casting magical missile. Even the “high pressure” setting is pretty low compared to a real pressure cooker.
Instant Pot sold a model called the Max which went up to the full pressure of stovetop pressure cookers. It didn’t sell. The problem is that it took so much longer to reach the highest pressure. The main limitation? North American household 110V 15-amp circuits max out at 1650W (and typical appliances max out around 1350W to leave margin).
If we had European 240V circuits we could have an Instant Pot designed for well over 2000W and it wouldn’t be an issue.
The same story goes for electric kettles. Alec of Technology Connections [1] went into extensive detail about it!
My instant pot (the “ultra” model) only draws a maximum of 700w. It’s very annoying that they seemingly cheaped out on the heating element, it makes it take way too long to get up to pressure.
Yup. I have an EU version, the heating element draws exactly 1000W during the pressurization cycle. It takes pretty much the same time to pressurize as the US version does.
Yes, you might not use it as an industrial broaster, which requires a significant amount of pressure. But for most home use, InstaPot is painless. And the cleanup is really easy.
Pressure cooking is magic. Your dhal is reliably done after 30 minutes, even with an old batch of beans. Before, I might have waited 2 hours, and dinner was till not ready because the beans were too old.
Regarding the set it and forget it, I can reliably steam to perfection any of the vegetables we regularly eat just by setting the pressure cook time to one minute. I don't have to constantly monitor the firmness, worry about the pot running out of water, or have uneven results. The device is worth it for that alone.
For me, culinarily, it is basically a slow cooker that produces acceptable results, and also isn't necessarily slow either. We do ribs a lot in the instant pot and while I disagree with just about every recipe on the internet and add 10-15 more minutes than they specify, it is still faster than conventional methods because the extra heat does matter. We also use it as a rice cooker a lot; whether or not it is faster it is convenient, and, you know, we have one, which makes it cheaper than buying a dedicated rice cooker.
- Hard-boiled eggs. Takes just 5 minutes. Not much time savings, but the eggs are consistently easy to peel and yes, I've tried it Serious Eats way too.
- Incubating yogurt. Makes a perfect batch of four mason jars worth every time.
- Risotto. Saves the 30 minutes of attending to rice where you slowly ladle in the broth.
- Black beans. Start from dry beans in a pinch, no soaking needed.
I'm doing a complete tear down remodel of the kitchen so I bought some devices to make our 95% cooked from scratch meal lifestyle bearable through the awful times.
A top of the line Breville toaster oven was the first, it's fantastic, but it is also silly to compare it to our 25 y/o Viking duel fuel range, waiting to reenter our life.
A week ago I got my Instant Pot Pro, and I've been putting it through its paces. I boiled some eggs. This is what really irks me about IP fans: it does not take 5 minutes. It has some indeterminate amount of preheat, the 5 min., and then a cool down. The eggs are just fine, as flawless as the following method on a quality gas burner stove: Put eggs and water into pot to just cover, turn burner high"ish"; when bubbles just start, turn down to a very very slow bubble generation and set timer for 10m (12-13min at 5500' elevation), scoop out the eggs when the timer expires and put on the counter, peel when cool enough. I very rarely had to spend any attention monitoring this. The IP is just, but only just, as good.
BUT ITS NOT FIVE MINUTES.
Shouting because why do instant pot fans do this?
Now, I am quite interested in the yogurt thing. That sounds very cool, we love yogurt and industrial yogurt, meh. Also strawberries are cheap right now and I'm thinking of making some exotic French confitures, and mixing that with the yogurt.
Risotto? No brainer on a decent stove. Dried beans? I also have a 30 y/o Magefesa pressure cooker that has a thicker bottom than the instant pot "pot" and does dried beans perfectly. No magic, or even "instant", there.
Another gripe: compared to the Breville that roller knob in the center is a gawdawlful POS. Reeks of cheap.
Compared to the 15 y/o electric range that is going to be tossed out the back doors, and then shot multiple times with 12 gauge 3" buckshot loads, the IP is great, so maybe I'm a little sad that the inevitable PE bankrupt/shitify it happened to it too.
But there's a very big difference when it comes to convenience: the Instant Pot (Or in my case the Sage/Breville Fast Slow Pro, which is great) has a built in timer and cooks automatically. Once you hit "start", you can walk away and come back any time to perfectly cooked eggs.
With a stove top method, you have to stand there and watch the timer, and manually turn off your stove when it's done.
I do! If I'm making boiled eggs its usually for a salad, so I want to make the eggs in advance and let them cool down before use anyway. It's nice to be able to set and forget and not have to babysit the pot or risk overcooking them. The pressure-cook method also adds a nice level of no-effort precision: if you want them slightly softer or harder you can just adjust the cook time by a minute or two. But with a pot if you want that level of precision you really have to babysit it... first wait for the water to boil, then add the eggs (risking cracking them when dropping in to boiling water), and start the timer, wait for timer, take them out as soon as timer goes off... it's just so much easier when you can skip all these steps!
There's also another advantage of the instant pot method: because it's cooking under pressure, it compresses the whites very slightly inside the shells as they cook. This means the shells always peel very easily from the eggs! Often when stovetop cooking, I'd get the shells sticking to the eggs which makes them difficult to peel.
When I make eggs in the Instant Pot, I do it on high pressure for 4 minutes, then immediately vent and plunge them into ice water. If I left them in any longer than that or even if I skip the ice bath, they'd be very overdone. I don't see how you can leave them unattended and not end up with very overdone and rubbery eggs.
In fact, if the Instant Pot has any disadvantage vs doing them in a pot, it's that the texture of the whites isn't as nice. The short cooking time that I use helps with that, but you have to be okay with not fully done yolks (which is something I prefer anyway).
I usually do take them out fairly quickly after I hear the end alarm. I also prefer yolks which are still a tiny bit runny, so I agree that a short cooking time and removing them quickly works best!
But it's not the end of the world if you don't as it cools down quite quickly when it vents (if set to quick-release). They might be slightly overdone, but certainly not as bad as forgetting them and leaving them boiling in a pot for 15+ minutes. Which I've done more times than I care to admit.
I usually make boiled eggs when I take food somewhere (be it for hiking or a lunch in the park). But I also drop them into cold water once they are cooked to stop the cooking, so they are quickly not that hot anymore.
Not having to worry about the timing does sound nice!
(Hmmm... with hatenjoy I may finally have ticked "create a legit googlewhack" off my bucket list. I see some usages that appear to be "Hat Enjoy" jammed together as a domain name or company name but a portmanteau of hate-enjoy Google is not finding for me. Of course Google isn't what it used to be...)
In my Instant Pot it's about 3-4 minutes to bring maybe 4 oz of water to pressure, 4 minutes to pressure cook, maybe a minute to release pressure and I'll do 8 eggs. So that's like half the cooking time.
Cooling time is the same. I plunge the eggs into an ice bath for 5 minutes before refrigerating.
I don't really do it for the time savings though. I mostly do it because it gives me a more consistent result. My egg yolks are always cooked exactly to the same doneness and the eggs are always easy to peel, even when starting with fresh eggs. (Freshness is the primary determinant of how easy eggs are to peel with older eggs being easier to peel than fresh eggs.)
I found that making them using the Serious Eats recipe I didn't always get consistent doneness (it's a lot harder to get the water temp exactly the same on a gas stove even with a thermometer). I also found they weren't always easy to peel.
So yes, the Instant Pot does save me time even with eggs where the time savings is minimal. More importantly it gives me a more consistent result with less attention from me.
YMMV.
On Rissoto, yes it's easy on a stove. But it requires you to stand there for 30 minutes lading in broth a little at a time. At least that's always the way I've done it to get a really nice result. On the Instant Pot, I can add all the ingredients at once an hit a button and 30 minutes later it's perfectly done w/o having required 30 minutes of my attention. I don't do it for the time savings. I do it because it's easier.
On beans, I didn't own a pressure cooker already.
On the yogurt, I never had consistent results trying to incubate naturally. I also tried a Yogotherm, coolers, my oven, the counter. Nothing worked. So I resolved that I needed to buy an incubator and when I learned the Instant Pot could do that and more, I bought it. It was like $80 on sale. I've been making perfect yogurt for like two years now.
Here's my recipe for creamy and nicely tart Bulgarian yogurt.
(I basically clone White Mountain.)
Fill four mason jars with whole milk. I use the Whole Foods brand ultra pasteurized whole milk. Screw lids loosely in place. Put jars into Instant Pot on top of the trivet. Fill with water till it comes up about 3/4 the way up the jars. Place lid on Instant Pot and set it to sous vide setting, 190° for 30 minutes.
When done pasteurizing, remove the mason jars and place them in cool (not cold or they will crack) water. I do this in my sink. After about 15 minutes remove the lid from one and check the temperature is below 110°. If not wait a bit longer. You could just let them cool on the counter top too but I'm a bit impatient with this step.
Add 1 tsp of starter to each jar and stir lightly. Put mason jars back in Instant Pot. Place lid on. Incubate for 8 hours. Once it's done incubating, place jars on counter for an hour or so, then move to the fridge.
For a starter, I use White Mountain Bulgarian Yogurt for a fresh batch. Then I can chain my own yogurt along as starter for months at a time.
I prefer to mix things into my yogurt when I eat it so I like to keep the yogurt itself nice and tart and don't mix anything in to the jars.
I make the yogurt in the mason jars from the start so I don't have to transfer it when it's done.
I make my own mostly because I enjoy making my own food. But it's also a lot cheaper and a bit easier on the environment. A 32 oz glass jar of White Mountain yogurt is almost $10 whereas a gallon of Whole Foods milk is $7.00. So $7 vs $40, and four fewer glass jars each batch.
Since I start by cloning White Mountain, my yogurt is basically identical and the taste is the same.
That is interesting. Like OP, we use ours constantly. I consider it to be the kitchen appliance I would never do without. I wonder if it comes down to OP and we making more similar foods than what you eat.
Interestingly, different people also use pressure cookers in entirely different ways, which I learned when my partner and I moved in together, and we both brought an Instant Pot the household.
I use mine exclusively for single items that I want to cook efficiently in bulk - eggs, beans, potatoes, yams, etc. (Most recently, made a pot full of chick peas this weekend to split between hummus and a quinoa salad.)
She uses hers for single-pot soups, stews, etc. that are ready to eat as-is.
This is quite possible. I use mine to cook wild rice, which takes awhile stovetop. And hard boiled eggs, which come out great. Everything else I've tried with it, I might as well just cook with the stove or oven. I don't like most recipes I've seen and am somewhat of a picky eater.
I have one from my sister-in-law, that she got from her (Israeli) partner's grandmother, which is a very traditional Israeli hummus recipe. That recipe is for stovetop and I adapted it to the instant pot.
The trick is to use baking soda when you cook the chickpeas in the instant pot, because it dissolves/softens the shells. Then you take them out and rinse thoroughly in water to get rid the baking soda taste, before slapping them into a food processor with tahini and whatever else.
Good quality tahini also makes a difference. Lots of north American brands have a wildly different taste than what's common in the middle east.
It is wonderful to use instead of an oven since it doesn't heat up the whole room and you can pressure cook dry beans without soaking to fully done in about 20 - 30 minutes.
> It is wonderful to use instead of an oven since it doesn't heat up the whole room
Energy efficiency is a big point. Between my Instant Pot and Air Fryer I have few opportunities to turn on the oven. These devices heat up faster, cook faster, and provide more consistent results. This is especially true now that I'm an empty nester and no longer cooking for a large family. It also makes it easy to resist the temptation to rely on processed foods.
If I’m being really miserly about heat output and/or food smells I’ll walk my pot out to the back deck to release. (Could also plug into an outdoor outlet to cook, but gets logistically complicated with timing if I’m not already hanging out on the deck.)
You're missing out, because you should be using it to make beans. As a bean cooker, it turns a annoying multi-hour job into from dry to beautifully cooked in an hour. As a rice cooker, you should just use a rice cooker, they're like 1/3 the price and you can run it at the same time as the bean cooker.
YMMV, but the rice cooker is mostly collecting dust since I got and Instant Pot. Why? The IP is much faster than a rice cooker. Also, the inner vessel is more durable - it's stainless steel (as opposed to the non-stick coating in the rice cooker), so no worries about scratches, dishwasher, etc... .
It's not just the convenience. Pressure cookers are way more energy efficient than boiling a big pot of food on an electric stove. If you're using an electric air conditioner to re-extract that heat from your house, the savings are even bigger.
You do need to know how long your food needs to cook up front, or be tolerant of overcooked food.
