Instant hit: The Instant Pot

You had only just traded in the pressure cooker you inherited from Grandma for a slow cooker, and now you have to get on board with the Instant Pot again. At least, according to pretty much the entire cooking world outside the Netherlands. An Instant Pot is a stainless-steel slow cooker with quite a few side jobs.

The Instant Pot is a slow cooker that has also taken courses in steaming, pressure cooking, sautéing and even making yoghurt. Incidentally, you can also use that yoghurt-making setting very well for letting bread dough rise.

Plug
We already explained here what a slow cooker is, with the Crock-Pot as the best-known example. Basically, a pan with a hermetically sealed lid and a plug that allows you to leave it to toil for hours at low temperatures without any flavour or moisture escaping from the ingredients. Ideal for when you’re at work. When you get home, the stew is ready. Provided you filled and switched on the pan before leaving.

Steaming rice, eggs, vegetables or oatmeal? The Instant Pot is your pan.

The Instant Pot takes things one step further. In addition to slow cooking, it can also pressure-cook quickly at high pressure. So it does what a traditional pressure cooker does, but without the threatening hissing. Things that normally take hours are ready in no time. That same stew, for example. For when you forgot to plug it in that morning.

Pulled pork
But it is also a steamer that perfectly cooks rice, vegetables, eggs and oatmeal. It makes soups and sauces. It prepares pulled pork and roasts chicken, makes risotto without stirring and chili con carne from dried kidney beans instead of canned beans, sautés onions and simmers shakshuka.

Deep-frying, baking bread, grilling? No, it can’t do those.

The fact that this plug-in pan is particularly popular in the US makes sense when you consider that urbanites there often don’t have a kitchen at all. You don’t need one with this pan that can do everything.

Almost everything
Well, it can’t deep-fry, for one thing. It can’t bake bread either. Or grill. But otherwise, almost everything.

An Instant Pot will soon also be available to buy directly in the Netherlands. Until then, order one through Amazon.com or another foreign webshop, for example.