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Few kitchen gadgets have attained the cultlike following of the Instant Pot. This multifunction pressure cooker promises to prep your meals in a fraction of the time it takes a Crock-Pot, or heck, any other pot in your kitchen.
People line up in droves to buy these things on Black Friday, then join Facebook groups with 2 million members and counting, swearing on their grandmama’s grave that the Instant Pot changed their life.
The Instant Pot is also billed as incredibly versatile: You can boil eggs in it, bake cheesecake, or whip up yogurt. There are even recipes out there for Instant Pot cough syrup. Plug just about any food you can imagine into Pinterest these days, and Instant Pot recipes pour forth.
This gadget is so hip, a ton of accessories have been spawned to dress it up, for example, a steam-breathing dragon for the pressure spout, straight out of “Game of Thrones” ($12.99 on Etsy).
Etsy.com
Basically, anyone who hasn’t bought into the hype yet has to wonder: Should I buy an Instant Pot, too?
I, for one, bowed to the pressure and bought my own Instant Pot during a Black Friday deal last year. It was my gift to myself, and boy, was I excited to try it out.
Now, however, I’m here to share some somewhat deflating news: I’ve used it three times since then. It’s served mostly as a very expensive dust collector, or the occasional doorstop.
As a busy mom with a full-time job, plus a small business on the side, I was hoping that the Instant Pot would change my life. But that excitement soon turned as sour as the yogurt I was promised I could make in my new gadget.
Here are just a few problems that came up along the way, to help provide a reality check just in case you’re thinking of caving to the pressure cooker pressure.
1. The Instant Pot is … complicated
When you buy an Instant Pot, you don’t get to plug it in and start cooking, instantly, as the name suggests. It’s one kitchen appliance in place of seven, and it’s got a lot of rules.
You’ve got to close the top vent for pressure cooking and open it for slow cooking. You’ve got to put in just enough water, but not too much—or else you might end up bathing your kitchen in a bone broth steam bath.
There’s also math to be done to figure out the exact amount of time your food will be in the pot.
It’s not just the time that the food will be cooking that you need to take into account. The Instant Pot is a pressure cooker, which means it needs to heat up and “pressurize” before it actually cooks anything.
There’s also a depressurization cycle that must occur at the end of cooking, before it’s safe to remove the lid. Forget to add time on at either end for those two steps, and you’ll be calling everyone in for a dinner that’s not anywhere close to ready.
You absolutely have to read the Instant Pot manual to get all this down, and even then, you’ll have to face a gadget with a whole lot of options to figure out before you’re comfortable.
Of course, the Instant Pot is one appliance promising to do just about everything except wash your dishes, so it has to have a dozen different buttons on the front that all do very different things.
But all these functions tend to make prep time more cumbersome. I’m always slowed down trying to remember which buttons to push and in what order, checking the venting valve, and tinkering with the lid to get a tight seal.
2. The Instant Pot doesn’t do it all
Sure, the Instant Pot can cook your food—up to a point. For many dishes, the Instant Pot only gets you “mostly done,” meaning you’ll have to warm up the oven anyway to finish the job.
Depending on the size of your oven, that may also require dirtying extra dishes, as the Instant Pot liner will be too tall to slip under the broiler, and you’ll have to move the food to another oven-safe container for the final step of cooking.
3. Cleaning the Instant Pot takes forever
The Instant Pot can save you cooking time, especially compared to a slow cooker. We prepare our dogs’ dinner in a Crock-Pot several times a week due to the special diet one of them needs, and the Instant Pot enabled me to make it in about 20 minutes rather than five hours.
However, once dinner’s done, it’s time to clean the Instant Pot, and that’s going to keep you busy for 10 minutes or more. The stainless-steel container in which the food actually cooks is dishwasher-safe, but nothing else on the contraption takes the same easy care.
You can’t immerse the outer housing of your Instant Pot in water. Instead, you’ve got to tackle food spills on the rim, as well as the multiple parts of the lid, by hand.
Those fiddly bits include a steam release valve that just seems to be begging for bacteria to grow. (Oh hello, warm, wet spot that’s also pretty dark and covered!)
The “sealing ring,” yet another part, can technically be put in the dishwasher, but only after you work it out of place—and you’ll have to get it back in place later.
There’s also a doodad that’s apparently known as the anti-block shield and is supposed to keep bits of food from getting pushed up into the pressure release valve and gumming up the works. Yes, this too needs to be tackled with warm, soapy water by hand.
After I’ve cooked something in the Crock-Pot, on the other hand, all I have to do is pop the stoneware dish and lid in the dishwasher.
4. The Instant Pot drives my dogs nuts
Before the Instant Pot seals, and steam shoots out of the top, it makes a sort of hissing noise that makes my dogs go bonkers.
The same thing applies at the end of the process, when I hit the valve to release the steam (with an oven mitt, by the way … hot steam plus bare skin = a loud yelp and rush to the freezer for some ice. Don’t ask me how I know).
One dog goes running. The other dog immediately starts whining.
Having done a little research (aka “asking around”), I’ve found that my critters are not alone in their reaction to the gadget.
Some cat owners report their kitties hiding out for days after one flick of the quick release valve. Others say their dog crawls into their lap when it hears the Instant Pot blow.
5. It’s not saving that much space
Part of the lure of the Instant Pot for me, and for others, is that it replaces a ton of other gadgets. It can serve as a pressure cooker, rice cooker, steamer, and yogurt maker. Some folks even say it replaces a sauté pan. That sounds like a whole lot of extra space on the counter, right?
Except … did you own a rice cooker, yogurt maker, or steamer? I didn’t, and after about a month with this new gadget taking up space on my counter, I realized I hadn’t save myself any space at all. I’d just added yet another gadget.
I already had my Crock-Pot. I already make rice and steam veggies in the same sauce pot. My oven has a warming function. And I can’t think of a single time I’ve ever been tempted to make my own yogurt.
So has the Instant Pot changed my life? Well, no, not unless you count that I now have an extra thing to trip over in my kitchen.
I’m not sure how many disgruntled Instant Pot owners are out there, but I guess only time will tell whether this gadget’s popularity will wane, much like the George Foreman Grill (remember that?).
The post I Hate the Instant Pot: 5 Reasons This Popular Pressure Cooker Isn’t Worth the Hype appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.
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