We love ours.
I follow Dave Chang on IG and watch his shows. Generally love the guy. But recently he's been on a war path to completely discredit the Instant Pot...for whatever reason. Look dude, not everyone has time to bust out several pans to pull together a meal. Throwing everything into the IP is much simpler for the average working person, especially parents, and it generally yields pretty fantastic results. Dude need some perspective.
I saw his recent FB post & tbh he's not wrong:
Instapot review:
This chili tasted great and it wasn’t because the instapot magically made it happen.
One of the only things instapot cooks well is chili. Basically anything beans. It’s exactly like a pressure cooker that you can get for $19.99 or a @normalpot that you probably already have in your house. Im using this thing because I’m bored out of my mind. I will never cook rice in it again.
It can make excellent braised meats which can then stretch out into nice broths, which electric pressure cookers are great at too. I made a tasty ramen broth by cooking a pork butt in it.
If you feel safer using an electric pressure cooker there are cheaper electric pressure cookers on the market. You don’t have to buy an instapot
I can’t wait for the air fryer instapot combo 3000 to come out.
If one my instapot zealot tells me if it’s multitude of platitudes. I’m gonna start washing my lettuce in laundry washer and drying it on spin cycle. Washer/dryer is multifunctional too.
My grade for the instapot: C+
Digital interface is not great. Heating element for sauté feature is not welll dispersed. Haven’t made yogurt in it...I will never in that thing. When denser items are cooking the interface doesn’t react to it well even if it’s covered in liquid and says “burnt”. C+ just like the move “burnt”. If it was $30 cheaper than it would get an B+ as a good electric pressure cooker. The warm feature is a joke. And it should never ever proclaim to cook rice well. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Chili - I added navy beans, all spice, ground beef, worstcheshire sauce, soy sauce, water and chicken bouillon, cinnamon, cumin, thyme, onion powder, garlic, Arbol chili, canned tomatoes and msg.
Per his points:
1. Chili only tastes as good as the recipe itself. The pressure-cooker just makes it faster & easier. I can set it for 18 minutes, push a button, and walk away.
2. I would argue that stovetop pressure cookers work better. They operate at 15 PSI, for example, as opposed to most electric pressure cooker's 11.6 PSI (although the new Instant Pot "Max" does 15 PSI). But we're talking about a difference of minutes here, so for me...meh. I would vastly prefer to have the extra safety features of the IP & the push-button operation, where it goes into keep-warm mode automatically, instead of having to babysit the stove. Yes, it's no big deal to do so, but I'm a man of High Convenience!
3. There are cheaper electric pressure cookers on the market, yes, but two points here: one, my favorite one (the 7-in-1 DUO) has price-stabilized at $79. It was double that when I bought my first one 5 or 6 years ago. I have no regrets about the price, as it's absolutely paid for itself. I saved so much money on my monthly food bill that I bought a Mustang lol. Second, the Instant Pot has a lot going for it: it has a metal pot, which by itself is worth the money. I would argue that it's safer than a lot of cheaper knockoffs. Also, there's a huge cult following, so you can easily try out & adopt a lot more recipes without fussing because the instructions are all the time based on the interface. But, an EPC is an EPC...my buddy bought one for $39 at Home Depot last year & it works just as good as my IP.
4. They already have an Instant Pot airfryer lid available lol. Came out after the Ninja Foodie tho, which did it first.
5. The digital interface could definitely stand to be improved. I have a older models & would really like just a dedicated "Start" button. But not a big issue once you get the hang of it.
6. He is correct, the heating element is not well-dispersed. I have 2 dedicated induction cooktops, an 1800-watt Nuwave PIC I use outdoors, and a 1,500-watt Tasty OneTop I use indoors, and they both suffer from the same problem (the heat ring effect).
7. Yes, certain items need to be stacked, and the Instant Pot documentation should be more clear about that. Milk & tomato sauces in particular suffer from this problem. The solution is to layer stuff on. Like with the chili, I do the fats, broth, then meats, then beans, then tomato sauces (salsas, pastes, etc.) on top.
8. I have no issue with the warming feature. I use it all the time. I also have the glass lid for the Instant Pot, which turns it into a crockpot more or less. Although I've only tried the slow-cooking feature a couple of times, my experiences were not great...I think a regular non-stick crockpot does a better job at being a slow-cooker, by far.
9. I disagree about the rice feature. I think it makes fantastic rice. It is not, however, good at holding the rice. I got rid of my Japanese fuzzy-logic Tiger rice cooker after I got my Instant Pot, but I kinda wish I didn't because it did hold rice for long periods of time really well.
10. I'm still working on mastering broths in general, but it's actually been quite a bit of work for me to even get them as good as I've gotten them, which by & large still aren't up to spec. I have not replicated a Ramen broth I'm in love with, but I also haven't done that in general, so I'm still chipping away on it.
So in short, he's not entirely wrong. He is opinionated, and as a professional cook, he has every right to be because he cooks meals the traditional way, is completely immersed in that methodology every single day, and makes his living that way. For me, food is more about meeting home production needs: I'm on a budget, I'm often strapped for time, after a long day I'm apathetic & don't really have the energy or interest to cook a big meal, I have a family to feed, etc. The Instant Pot is a fantastic tool for me. IP cultists make it sound like it will solve all of life's problems, but it won't, but it does do a HUGE amount of stuff very,
very easily, which is what makes me excited about it - I can get consistent results, there's a huge pool of recipes to draw on, huge online communities, it's like push-button simple for most recipes, and it's mostly hands-off once you being the preheat/cook/cooldown cycle.
I have a number of food service clients that I've converted to electric pressure cooking, whether it's various types of sauces, beans from dry stock, rices, or whole meals. One of my clients is now up to six pressure cookers on their line. I actually just talked with them the other day & they said switching to pressure-cooking has helped save their business because they are 100% takeout-only now & are able to plow through volume production of frozen homemade meals with fewer staff (due to budget restrictions from COVID) & still meet the growing curbside requirement. I will say that it was like pulling teeth for most of them. Chef's worldviews are typically pretty locked in, and generally speaking, not only are traditional pressure cookers not always highly thought of, but there's often a huge amount of resistance to any type of electric convenience gadgets. I've had to do quite a few pro-bono on-site cooking session to get cooks & business owners to change their minds about what a pressure cooker is & what it can do lol. In a commercial environment, being able to multi-task while pressure-cooking makes it worth doing just for that feature alone!