If you’re like me you’ve probably been inundated with posts on social media and mommy blogs all raving about how amazing the Instant Pot is. I finally had to try it for myself to see what all the hype was about. In this review we’ll go over the pros and cons of ownership as well as give a general overview of what you can achieve with this kitchen appliance of the future.
Appearance
The exterior of the Instant Pot is unmistakably cool, it looks like something out of the Jetsons, it features a sleek brushed stainless steel exterior, and heavy duty construction, it’s built like a tank and that is important given it’s task of pressurizing your food at extreme temperatures. The interior mirror finish stainless steel pot is removable and features measurements by the quart on the inside.
The buttons can be a bit overwhelming for someone who is unfamiliar with these machines, with a little bit of a learning curve this is easily overcome, though. The first meal we cooked with our Instant Pot was chicken noodle soup, it felt like the least intimidating meal to prepare and it proved to be quite easy to make.
One cool feature of the instant pot is the ability to sauté your ingredients in the stainless pot, adding garlic, onion and butter helped prepare the base of the soup, I was able to achieve a rich golden brown texture to ingredients. Next, we proceeded to toss in our cubed chicken breast meat, veggies, noodles and broth. The next thing step was to set the timer, we simply pressed the button until we reach the number 10.
After your cooking time has been reached some recipes call for “natural release” of the pressure built up…this simply means to let the instant pot settles on it’s own according for a set amount of time and and then slowly releasing pressure by hand using the steam release on the top of the pot. It’s extremely important to make sure all the steam is released before you open the instant pot, there are multiple safety mechanisms built into the unit to help ensure safety you just have to be mindful of what you’re doing.
Releasing the pressure is pretty easy, it’s amazing to open the lid after de-pressurizing and seeing the finished meal. It’s almost effortless cooking, it’s insane!
Cooking with Pressure
Like most people looking into the Instant Pot I was a bit skeptical that it would deliver on it’s promise of delivering no compromise meals in a flash. However, I was pleasantly surprised by just how capable this machine was. It’s not “instant” but it is at least 3-4 times faster than traditional cooking methods.
Having used this unit for the last 3 months we have tried various soups and rice. It’s become a staple in our kitchen and we were surprised that it can also make perfectly cooked rice, in fact this is what we have begun using it for the most. White rice in particular can be rather difficult to perfect but the Instant Pot performs flawlessly each time we use it.
I can highly recommend this kitchen tool, it’s rather inexpensive and works beautifully on days when you just want to make something with minimal effort and cleanup. There are so many recipes and websites dedicated to it now too, you will be surprised at how much you can find uses for it in your kitchen.