Amuse-bouche

An investigation of the Instant Pot

Ever wonder where a culinary trend got its start? Here’s a quick review of the old-school appliances that joined forces with cutting-edge technology to create the 21st-century kitchen phenomenon that seems to be everywhere in the food world these days — the Instant Pot.

In the beginning, there was the pressure cooker. Invented by a French physicist in 1679, the “steam digester” aimed to help food cook more quickly by raising the boiling point of water. After Presto unveiled a simpler saucepan version at the 1939 World’s Fair, pressure cookers became the most profitable housewares sold in the United States, a position they maintained until the late 1950s.

Next on the scene was the slow cooker. Patented in 1940 as the Naxon Beanery, the device sold millions throughout the 1970s after its inventor sold the rights to Rival Manufacturing, which rebranded it as the Crock Pot. Even though sales slowed in the ’80s, by 2011, 83 percent of American families reported owning a slow cooker according to Consumer Reports, which measures these things.

Fast forward to 2017, when the Instant Pot — a computerized electric multicooker that performs seven basic functions — pressure cooker, slow cooker, yogurt maker, warmer, steamer, and rice cooker that can also sauté — became Amazon’s best-selling Black Friday home and kitchen offering. Hitting the market first in 2010, the Instant Pot accelerated its journey from new device to cult status on Amazon Prime Day in 2016, when more than 215,000 were sold in 24 hours.

Invented by Robert Wang, an out-of-work Canadian computer scientist, the Instant Pot is a familybased business that went viral without a marketing department or a single outside investor. By merely listing the pot on Amazon, and sending test units to influential cooks, chefs, and food bloggers, Instant Pot triggered stories and recipes on the web and via social media. Sales began to climb, primarily by word-of-mouth. Today it’s impossible to visit an online food site or thumb through a magazine without encountering Instant Pot stories and recipes. The Nom Nom Paleo site was an early adopter — there’s nothing like a pressure cooker to process a large cut of meat quickly. Vegetarians, vegans, and clean food proponents like Whole30 are also fans of the device, which can cut the cooking time for grains and beans from hours to minutes.

Sites and publications as diverse as The Salt, The Kitchn (which indexes more than 50 Instant Pot stories and recipes), Cooking Light, Food52, Weight Watchers, Tasting Table, Bon Appétit, and The New York Times —as well as Instant Pot-dedicated bloggers like Amy & Jacky at www.pressurecookrecipes.com — feed the still-growing demand for more stories, more instruction, and more recipes specifically adapted to the multicooker. Even the venerable New Yorker recently profiled “The ‘Butter-Chicken Lady’ Who Made Indian Cooks Love The Instant Pot” — a story about Urvashi Pitre, a Dallas-based scientist, food blogger, and author of the newly released Indian Instant Pot

Cookbook. Pitre realized that the device “was a natural match for Indian cooking, with settings for stewing meats, cooking lentils, beans, and rice, and even making yogurt,” in a fraction of the time, and without the need to stay close to the stove. (A New Yorker website update, in what must be a first for the magazine, tagged Pitre’s butter chicken recipe onto the end of the original story.)

Though other manufacturers have brought their own versions of the multicooker to the marketplace, the Instant Pot is still the star of the multicooker universe. There are more than 25,000 product reviews on Amazon; the official Instant Pot Community on Facebook boasts more than one million members internationally, many of whom praise the pot for its impact on their cooking — and their lives — with almost religious zeal.

The Northern New Mexico cooks with whom we spoke, while largely positive about their experiences with multicookers, were less fanatical about the Instant Pot itself. Schelly Talalay Dardashti, a journalist and genealogist, is wildly enthusiastic about her Aroma multicooker. “I love it!” she said. When she lived in Iran, Dardashti says, “We always used pressure cookers because the meat was like four thousand years old, and if you didn’t pressure-cook it, you couldn’t chew it. There was no Persian kitchen that didn’t have a pressure cooker.” But she said she always hated using those old-school pressure cookers because she feared they would blow up — not something she worries about with the Aroma — although she acknowledged she uses the pot more frequently as a slow cooker than as a pressure cooker.

Dardashti particularly appreciates that she can sauté and cook in the same pot, that it creates less mess in the kitchen, requires fewer utensils, and cleans up quickly and easily. “Everything is self-contained,” she said, and when you’ve finished cooking, “you rinse the nonstick liner off and clean the little