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How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

bbc.co.uk

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Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#171

Post by GrandTheftR »

koolba wrote: post #22
AlexB138 wrote: post #2

This is pretty funny for me to read. As the article mentions many people apparently did, I picked up an Instant Pot on Prime Day last year. I had no idea there was such a following around it until reading this, I just wanted a pressure cooker. I received it, and stuck it in my closet expecting to pull it out when I needed to pressure cook something. My wife discovered it pretty soon after and began using it for sever…

What's an example of a task you didn't think it was capable of?

My son and I had lots of fun making Yogurt with it. Cooking hard "boiled" egg is another unexpected finding after googling cook time for boiled egg

Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#172

Post by [deleted] »

shostack wrote: post #115

Have had one since Black Friday. I feel generally competent in the kitchen to the point where assembling a nice meal (dare I say gourmet?) from scratch without a recipe is relatively easy for me. That said, I've found the Instant Pot to have a steep learning curve. For starters, you can't easily check on the food while it cooks, so if you are experimenting with large batch sizes and timing you are kind of gambling an…

[deleted]

Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#173

Post by bryanlarsen »

unoti wrote: post #93
douche wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having now looked up the difference between the two (I've only ever seen pressure canners, with the locking lids and real pressure gauges, but which everyone I know calls a pressure cooker ), I'm now curious what in the world you would use a plain pressure cooker for? It seems like a strictly worse piece of equipment.

You'd use a regular pressure cooker for things like cooking a roast or chili in 45 minutes instead of 4 hours.

You can do that in a canner too. A canner can function as a pressure cooker, but a pressure cooker can't function as a canner.

Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#174

Post by namdnay »

ajmurmann wrote: post #69
smanatstpete wrote: post #67

Three things Instant Pot does that my older non-electric pressure cookers could not do: 1. Preserve the shape of the food being cooked. The older non-electric cooker would mush all the garbanzo beans or vegetables into a mash. When I cooked with the instant pot for the first time, I thought nothing was cooked fully because every vegetable and bean still were mostly in its original shape. 2. No noise. Non-electric coo…

I'm not sure if you are using your regular pressure cooker correctly. Your vegetables should come out similar as if you steamed them. You are probably cooking them too long. The pressure cooker also shouldn't have to vent all the time. At least with my Kuhn Rikkon you have to carefully adjust the temperature to ensure the food is at the right temperature and then very little venting should happen. Of course that also…

the standard SEB pressure cooker that every household owns in France constantly vents when under pressure - there's a kind of spinning valve on the top that make a choo-choo train noise :) usually you turn the hob to full until it starts spinning, then you reduce to low for the duration of the cooking

Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#175

Post by creaghpatr »

rnernento wrote: post #65

It's great to see the Instant Pot on Hacker News. A couple of key takeaways: - There's no marketing magic here, this is just a great product. - It's ugly, and the interface is weird. Doesn't matter, it gets the job done. - Pressure cookers have been around for a long time, they're a really great cooking technology marred by some serious safety and inconvenience issues. There are a bunch of companies competing in Sous…

Love the points made here, my first impression of this was I thought this pot was sort of gimmicky/redundant than practical for daily use.

Then I went home for Christmas and my mom was downright evangelical about this thing. My family is deep in the cooking gadget game but I've never seen this much enthusiasm for a new appliance.

Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#176

Post by CommieBobDole »

zhte415 wrote: post #31

This is amazing. I am serious. An electric pressure cooker brand (I've never heard of, but I don't like in Canada/US which seems to be the prime market) took over the electric pressure cooker market by adding buttons instead of a twist-dial timer where you manually set the desired time (my electric pressure cooker, which came free with by fridge years ago, and may be part of the reference to scaring people about expl…

I don't even know if they've done that much; I've got an old "Wolfgang Puck" branded electric pressure cooker with digital controls that I got for free, and it appears to be pretty much the same thing, as far as I can tell.

Seems like their real achievement here is successfully marketing a good version of an already-existing product with the "I made this" angle to a market that wasn't aware of it. And more power to them - pressure cooking is a great technique to have in your culinary arsenal. Still, it just seems odd to me when someone "invents" a thing that already exists and manages to generate tons of press for doing so. Reminds me of the Soylent guy.

Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#177

Post by apathy »

vasco wrote: post #155
AtheistOfFail wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but people tend to exclude that since you're not watching the pot.

Then it should be more like 30 seconds, 15 to put things in and 15 to take things out, or are you watching it for those 7 minutes? Just trying to point out that you should quote the actual time it takes.

The soul of marketing is getting people to overlook stuff like the laws of physics, the arrow of time, and compound interest. Any time you find yourself resorting to the word "should," it's a good idea to ask:

1) why would the universe naturally favor order? 2) why would the order it favors please my sensibilities?

Questioning the above premises will often yield opportunities that a rigid attention to preconceived notions would not.

Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#178

Post by criddell »

wlll wrote: post #132
criddell wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 seconds? My machine takes 30 minutes just to heat up. I bought my grinder (Baratza Vario) and machine (an E61 based heat exchanger) in 2012 and they are getting to the end of life. I'm seriously thinking about switching to a Nespresso setup because it's way more convenient and the coffee is still pretty good. We have a k-cup machine at work and it's drinkable, but not great.

There was a nespresso machine at the office where I used to work. The coffee it produced was tolerable and nothing more. I recommend an Aeropress if you want something quick that makes good coffee.

I have an Aeropress and like it a lot, but it's not that quick. You still have to grind beans, heat water, and steep (usually).

Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#179

Post by jedberg »

shostack wrote: post #115

Have had one since Black Friday. I feel generally competent in the kitchen to the point where assembling a nice meal (dare I say gourmet?) from scratch without a recipe is relatively easy for me. That said, I've found the Instant Pot to have a steep learning curve. For starters, you can't easily check on the food while it cooks, so if you are experimenting with large batch sizes and timing you are kind of gambling an…

We have three IPs, because my wife loves them. Pretty much everything she makes is a one pot meal that is easily freezable. She gets most of the recipes from various IP groups on Facebook. Perhaps you'll want to find those to get what you want.

She ends up not having to do a lot of experiments because the other people in the group do it and report back. She's actually started doing some reporting back too.

Re: How the Instant Pot cooker developed a cult following

#180

Post by jedberg »

slantyyz wrote: post #94
rnernento wrote: post #65

It's great to see the Instant Pot on Hacker News. A couple of key takeaways: - There's no marketing magic here, this is just a great product. - It's ugly, and the interface is weird. Doesn't matter, it gets the job done. - Pressure cookers have been around for a long time, they're a really great cooking technology marred by some serious safety and inconvenience issues. There are a bunch of companies competing in Sous…

One thing I also notice is that the silicone seal inherits past smells of things you've cooked. Seems to be hard to get rid of the smell too.

We have multiple rings in the house, one designated "sweet" and the other "savory", so that we can avoid this problem.
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