Those who have been monitoring Amazon's Prime Day offers since yesterday may have noticed that among the most promoted products – it is even drawn in the illustrations dedicated to the day, and you can see in the image at the head of the Post article on discounts – there is a electric pressure cooker that does various things: it's called Instant Pot and Amazon promotes it a lot because in past editions of Prime Day and Black Friday it was one of the best-selling products in the United States and there has been a lot of talk about it. These days Prime Day is the first occasion on which it is really offered: at 80 euros, 50 less than the list price.
Where does the Instant Pot come from?
The Instant Pot is at the same time an electric pressure cooker, a slow cooker (i.e. one of those gadgets for cooking things very slowly to obtain particular cooking effects, once achievable only in restaurants: in practice the opposite of a pressure cooker), a rice cooker and a yoghurt maker. Its main attraction is that it takes very little time to cook things that normally take a long time, a general characteristic of pressure cookers, having various safety systems and a very easy to use interface (even if not immediately intuitive) for which it is also used by those people (in the editorial staff of the Post there are) who do not use normal pressure cookers because they do not trust their ability to avoid explosions enough.
The Instant Pot has existed since 2009, when the electric pressure cooker market was already highly developed in China but not in the United States and Canada, the country of its creators. In 2010, about 300 thousand electric pressure cookers were sold in the North American market: in 2015, the year in which Amazon organized the first Prime Day and put the Instant Pot among the very discounted products (66 dollars instead of 129), it reached more than three millions. Amazon is the store where most Instant Pots are sold.
How to use it
There are various models of Instant Pot, also different according to the capacity. According to Wirecutter, the authoritative review site of the New York Times, the best (even taking into consideration the models of other brands) is the Instant Pot Duo 6, the same one on offer on the Italian Amazon. It has 5.7 liters of capacity, weighs 5 kilos and is 35 centimeters high. It is easy to clean because the food to be cooked is not placed in the fixed part of the pot, but in a separate steel container, which is inserted inside and can be washed in the dishwasher; is the one all the way to the right in the image above.
For the rest, once you understand the functions of the different controls, the Instant Pot is very simple to use, if you know how pressure cookers work: the basic mechanism is based on the fact that the boiling temperature of the water varies according to pressure and if the pressure is higher the water boils at higher temperatures. This is the reason why in the high mountains, where the atmospheric pressure is lower than at sea level, water boils before reaching 100 ° C. With a pressure cooker (which is always used by putting water inside it) by heating the pressure is increased and therefore higher temperatures are reached and with less energy use, for this reason the foods cook more quickly. If the pressure cooker is electric, the safety systems are more sophisticated than the simple valve of common pressure cookers and the temperature can be adjusted more precisely.
With Instant Pot cooking is very fast but it is not exactly instant as the name suggests: it takes 15 minutes for the right pressure to be reached and then another 10, at the end of cooking, to release the steam. For this reason, for a recipe that requires 30 minutes of cooking, a total of 50-55 are needed, even if many things are cooked in less time.
To avoid damage, just leave the safety valve for steam uncovered; there is a safety mechanism that prevents the pot from opening while it is under pressure and in the event that the valve does not work there is a sensor that switches off everything before the pressure rises too much.
A manual in Italian can also be downloaded from the British site of the manufacturer. Other models, different from the Duo, have more functions, such as sterilization or cooking at low temperatures: they are therefore interesting for those who want to use the pot for cooking in a more sophisticated way. A model can even be set with an app thanks to a wifi connection.
The Instant Pot is suitable for cooking meat (except chicken) but not fish; legumes and some types of very hard vegetables, but not all. In general it is useful for obtaining soft foods starting from ingredients that traditionally require a long cooking time, while it is not good for obtaining crunchiness. According to the New York Times it is also good for cooking polenta and hard-boiled eggs: in the latter case it does not save energy, but makes them much easier to shell because the pressure causes the air contained in the membrane between the shell and the egg white are distributed evenly, separating them (yes, there is a little air in the egg, what the chicks need to breathe and yes, the egg is slightly permeable to air).
Disclaimer: on some of the sites linked in articles with the tag Consumismi the Post has an affiliation and obtains a small share of the revenues, without price changes. But you can also google for the same things.
