‘Smart’ Pressure Cookers: Do They Work?

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Water poured from the electric pressure cooker as the digital readout flashed an alarm and the cauliflower remained as raw as the day it was picked — forget about the still-frozen salmon fillets. So much for dinner. I punted and ordered Chinese from down the street.

Such was my first dinner with an Instant Pot.

I’m slightly obsessed with my slow cooker, from morning steel-cut oats to stews that pack the fridge. There’s a beautiful simplicity in cooking with something that doesn’t overheat my small apartment kitchen, and I can run out to fetch the kid or attend a business meeting while dinner cooks itself. But a family of three can only eat so many fall-apart chicken thighs or bean stews. Friends have sung the praises of the Instant Pot electric pressure cooker so I wondered, could the Instant Pot fill in the gaps?

Then when I heard Instant Pot had introduced a “smart” version last year, I knew I had to try it. It’s Bluetooth-enabled so if you download an app to your mobile device, you can send recipes directly to the machine. Adding tech on kitchen appliances has been trendy for a while (think WiFi fridges and ovens), and it’s a growing market. According to Intel, today there are about 15 billion connected devices. That number is expected to hit 200 billion by 2020 — and that’s because of all the things in our homes and offices expected to join the computing clouds. My kitchen tech tops out at a 7-year-old microwave and a slow cooker with a cracked insert. Could I step it up?

The Instant pot company offered to send me a review copy of their smart machine (noted in full disclosure, though they asked for no editorial promises in return.) The not-so-smart version runs about $130 on Amazon, the upgraded version $235).

Pressure cookers aren’t new — the stovetop version is a staple in many kitchens. A seal in the lid keeps steam and heat from escaping from a pot, which in turn brings the interior temperature higher than a pot on a stove can reach. This cooks the food faster. You can’t reach brown things, like crispy Brussels sprouts, but anything that can be steamed, braised, or slow-cooked can do so faster under pressure. Electric pressure cookers like the Instant pot have the same premise, they just plug in instead of sit on a burner.

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I picked a few basic recipes: short ribs and salmon for dinner, hummus and beets for lunch, steel cut oats (recipe included in a booklet with the cooker), and of course, rice. I often make stock from chicken bones, so I added bone broth to the list, from the short rib leftovers — and also to take advantage of the app (more on that in a minute).

First, the drawbacks
The cooking time is misleading. “Three minute oats” refers to the minutes on the cook-timer — but that doesn’t include the time the machine needs to reach full pressure, and the time it takes to release the built-up steam. Add another 10 to 20 minutes total cook time.

Pressure cooking doesn’t always take less time than a stove, microwave or oven. Frozen salmon still took about 30 minutes total — twice as long as in the oven if defrosted first.

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The instructions can be confusing — the flooded table was my fault, but I found several steps unclear. For example, brown rice — the manufacturer guidelines call for 22-28 minutes, a large time range. And the  “Rice” button only goes up to 12 minutes.

Now the good
The short ribs were perfect. Restaurant perfect. Not dry or overly soft, like my slow cooker meat attempts, but just-right tender. I could time the cooking better. My husband, a recently reformed vegetarian, is still nervours around meat. He ate four.

The salmon was perfect. Frozen, slathered in BBQ sauce, wrapped in foil and steamed, it emerged delicate and suffused with flavor. The brown rice also emerged with the right balance of soft but not wet.

I put the chickpeas on, left for 30 minutes to pick up my daughter at preschool, and came home to tomorrow’s lunch (she loves hummus and beets), without worries I would burn the house down.

One-pot sausage and pasta. (Photo: Instant Pot)

And that’s why my slow cooker will likely move to a higher shelf, and the Instant pot take its place — because it handles so many types of cooking, with more precision, in a safe electronic casing.

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Notice the lack of tech talk — and there’s a reason for that. Because the Bluetooth — the connection that links your cell phone to a wireless headset —falls flat. The idea is that complicated recipes that require much fiddling with cooking temperatures and pressure can be handled electronically — the bone broth recipe, for example, includes nine steps and three hours. Load it on the app hit a button to send the “script” to the cooker, and it will alternate heat and pressure at ideal intervals. An iPad readout showed every temperature rise and fall. It was fascinating.

But the connection doesn’t extend far — I made it about 8 feet down the hall from my kitchen before disconnecting. I couldn’t set the cook timer from the app. And there’s only a handful of scripts available. Japanese hot spring eggs, which require precise temperatures to achieve an almost pudding-like yolk, appear on the app. But that’s not a must-have for us. Oatmeal is, and that I can program faster than I can call it up on my tablet.

Kale, sausage and potato soup. (Photo: Instant Pot)

Bob Wang, the company CEO, acknowledges that Bluetooth cookery may not entice every customer. He likens this to any first-generation new technology.

“It’s like a first-generation iPhone,” he says. “The first generation iPhone is really rudimentary, and to some extent very user unfriendly. Same with smart cookers — we are very constrained by the device and manufacturing.”

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Bluetooth technology can’t offer the same linkage that a real WiFi Internet connection could — but that broaches a whole new level of security concerns, Wand notes, from hackers violating the connection, and gaining access to everything in a home, or every home with an Internet-enable kitchen gadget.

But the security isn’t insurmountable, and he estimates all kitchen cookers will be connected within the next 10 years.

Is it innovation? Or just shoving somethings together to take advantage of trends? Usability expert Amanda Rotondo isn’t so sure.

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“Remember when you were planning your wedding and any time you put ‘wedding’ in front of anything the price triples? You can get a cake for $50 or you can get a wedding cake for $700. I feel like the word ‘smart’ is worth an extra $50 or $100.”

Some early adopters love to get in there, figure things out, and give a company feedback.

“But the majority of people want nothing to do with that and just want a thing that works,” says Rotondo, the director of user experience at TrueFit, and a self-described 30-something Italian grandmother in the kitchen.

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All of which begs the question: Would I buy an Instant Pot Smart? To be honest, no. My budget is tight (hello, preschool tuition) and $230 for some eggs and broth doesn’t add up. But that’s just about the Bluetooth. There’s a place for ovens and stovetops — a pressure cooker can’t get that nice crisp char that makes roasted cauliflower so addicting — but for easy weeknight dinners, I’m sold. Now excuse me while I check on my stuffed peppers for tonight. They should take about five minutes.