The Instant Pot Is Not Overrated. You’re Just Not Using It Right.
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The Instant Pot had a moment where it felt like the most evangelized kitchen appliance in existence, which created the inevitable backlash from people who bought one, made rice twice, and then put it in a cabinet next to the spiralizer. Both reactions are understandable and both are missing the point. The Instant Pot is not a toy. It’s not a rice cooker with a marketing budget. It’s a pressure cooker that also does several other things, and pressure cooking is one of the genuinely useful cooking techniques that most home kitchens don’t currently have access to. Tough cuts of meat in forty minutes. Dried beans without soaking overnight. Stock in ninety minutes that would take four hours on a stove. Those are real advantages and they solve real problems if you cook at home regularly. The people who bought it and never used it weren’t wrong about the tool. They were wrong about whether they needed what the tool does.
Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1
The standard model that most people should start with. Pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, sauté pan, yogurt maker, and warmer — seven functions in one appliance. Most people use three of those functions regularly. The others are there when you need them. The 6-quart is the right size for most households of one to four people. The 8-quart if you regularly cook for more or you batch cook and want larger capacity. The learning curve is real but short. The first use — whatever it is — will feel slightly uncertain. By the third or fourth use it’s intuitive and you’ll wonder why you ever braised something in an oven for three hours when the Instant Pot does the same thing in forty minutes. Check Current Price on Amazon
What to Make First
Chicken thighs from frozen. Twelve minutes on high pressure with a cup of liquid, natural release. Fully cooked, tender, usable for anything. This is the use case that converts skeptics fastest because it’s genuinely impossible in any other appliance — you cannot cook frozen chicken thighs to a safe internal temperature in twelve minutes any other way. After that: dried chickpeas without soaking, which takes about forty-five minutes from dry to done. Beef stew in thirty minutes instead of two hours. Hard-boiled eggs that peel perfectly, every time, with no effort.
What Not to Bother With
Quick-cooking vegetables — the Instant Pot is overkill for anything that takes less than ten minutes on the stove, and the time to pressurize and depressurize erases any time advantage. Anything you need to brown and then serve — you can sauté in the pot, but it’s slower than a pan and you lose the fond faster. Delicate fish and seafood, which overcooks in the time it takes to come to pressure.
The Short Version
If you cook tough cuts of meat, beans from dry, or large batches of anything regularly, the Instant Pot is worth the counter space. If you mostly cook quick weeknight meals of fresh vegetables and fish, you probably don’t need it and the air fryer is a better use of your budget. Buy it for what it’s actually good at, not for everything it claims to do.