Equipment Reviews: Multicookers

[Music] thanks to the extreme popularity of the instant pot over the past few years many many people are falling in love with pressure cooking and for good reason electric multi-cookers like the instant pot are incredibly fast and they're easy and the food tastes great because the pot is tightly sealed all the volatile flavor molecules stay in the pot instead of evaporating away juices concentrate and make rich savory built-in sauce and bonus multi-cookers have saute functions so you can brown food right in the pot so you end up with fewer dishes to wash you don't even have to turn on the stove multi-cookers can be frugal choices because they can replace a handful of other appliances they pressure cook using temperatures above the boiling point to rapidly cook food they slow cook using gentle steady heat for tender meats and rich stews they cook rice and grains replacing a rice cooker and even make yogurt so you don't need a yogurt maker either it must also function as a steamer and if you even claim to bacon to sous-vide trouble is there a lot of brands at a huge range of prices so which is the best one to pick to find out we bought 13 multi-cookers in both eight quart and six quart sizes priced from about seventy seven dollars to nearly two hundred fifty dollars and then we made a ton of food we pressure cooked 13 batches of beef stew 13 batches of boston baked beans then we slow cooked 13 more batches of both beef stew and baked beans and we pressure cooked 13 batches of white rice along the way we evaluated how easy the multi-cookers were to set to cook in and clean up and most importantly how well the food came out and to understand our cooking results we tracked the temperature of water in each machine at the low and high pressure settings for 15 minutes each and the slow cooker on low for five hours and when we got close to finding a winner we pushed the top two models a little bit harder we made pressure and slow cooked north carolina-style pulled pork and we compared the results finally in our very top contender we made cashew yogurt and since it claimed to also do sous-vide cooking we made sous-vide soft poached eggs now first the good news all the multi-cookers did pretty well with pressure cooking they turned out excellent stew and beans and rice with one exception a model by allclad this pot never achieved a tight seal and it leaked steam meaning it couldn't reach pressure and food never fully cooked a second copy of this machine performed the same now we did find that our water temperature tracking test revealed that two models reached their full temperatures faster and stayed there more consistently than others which we really appreciated more models started to choke when we tried slow cooking in fact slow cooking has always been our biggest disappointment with multi-cookers who wants to wait eight hours only to find out that your food isn't anywhere near done so where we saw uneven results in our cooking our water temperature test revealed the reason the temperatures of some of these machines fluctuated quite a bit throughout cooking and took much longer than others to reach their target temperatures as a result some of these models took up to two hours longer than higher performing models to fully cook beef stew in beans one even hovered in the danger zone where bacteria can grow a little bit too long that's between 40 degrees and 140 degrees fahrenheit that gave us concerns about food safety now the takeaway how long a multi-cooker takes to reach its maximum temperature and how well it holds that temperature consistently is the key to well-cooked food in these machines we also saw differences in how the machines seared or browned food now we've always known that if you can brown the food first before pressure cooking or slow cooking the final flavors are much better now while these all have searing browning or sauteing settings and they kind of mix them all together there's no consistency they also vary from machine to machine and how well they worked some were hard to figure out the best just indicated low medium and high temperatures on their controls without over complicating things we also liked when models signaled that they were preheating and then alerted us when they were hot and ready to saute food sadly a few of these multi-cookers had really weak heat and they barely softened the onion or brown the beef for the stew we need real power at our disposal to make this function worthwhile now aside from how well they performed there were a few key ease of fuse factors that really separated the best from the worst in general we found digital screens were much easier to read compared to busy buttons knobs and dials next very annoyingly some of these machines don't let you adjust the settings without shutting down and starting over obviously we really preferred ones that let us make changes in progress and here's something to know while most typical interior cooking pots spin around and drive us crazy when we saute and sear in them two of the models had pots that were anchored in place by silicone handles and those stayed cool throughout cooking and made it really easy to lift that's great design on the bad design side two models had big heavy attached lids those just got in the way while we were loading ingredients or sauteing food we prefer lids you can take right off another thing to check the material of the cooking pot some were plain stainless steel while others were non-stick coated we found the stainless steel pots seared and sauteed more deeply and evenly and they developed more flavorful fond than the nonstick cooking pots the dark interiors of those nonstick pots also made it harder for us to see and monitor browning but those non-stick pots they're much easier to clean than stainless steel pots it's your call about what you prefer finally when you're pressure cooking releasing steam is done two ways a slow natural release that lets cooking wind down over 15 minutes or so and a quick release where you stop cooking fast by pressing a valve that sends steam shooting out of the pot and when you're used to it i have to admit the jet of steam is kind of cool but it's also kind of scary and a lot of machines make you keep pressing the valve the whole time the steam is shooting out and your hand is really near that jet of steam you can use a tool like a wooden spoon to press down on the valve but it's still a bit fraught we loved a few models that use a simple steam release switch so you can keep your hands away from the hot jet of steam this is a really nice innovation now size as i mentioned we tested both six and eight quart sizes eight quart models offered larger cooking surfaces and that's helpful when you're browning food like when we made stew because we could brown the beef in fewer batches and saute the chopped onion more quickly than we could in those six quart models the larger cooking surfaces and the eight quart models also brought liquids to a simmer more quickly and they reduced the liquids faster but again there was a trade-off those eight quart models take up more counter space while we recommend you get an eight quart multi cooker if you have the space we did find that most six quart versions of our favorite multi-cookers were fine as long as you don't mind sauteing a brownie food in more batches after two full months of testing cooking more than 68 pounds of meat and 26 pounds of beans we've learned a couple of important things first we never really wanted to see another baked bean and we could really take a break before we ate more beef stew but we also found our new favorite multi-cooker it's called the instant pot duo evo plus nine in one electric pressure cooker eight quarts and it's priced at around 140 dollars this performed beautifully with both pressure and slow cooking and we love that its pot was equipped with those silicone handles that anchored in place while we cooked and made it really easy to lift out the stainless steel pot seared really well without nonstick coating that might wear off over time its well-designed pressure release switch which is far from the steam valve was really a pleasure to use and its digital controls were easy to operate while the sous-vide function was a bit of a bust it struggled to reach the target temperature we needed it did everything else at a high level and we highly recommend it now watch out when you go to shop for this because instant pot also has another duo pot you want the duo evo evo for a less expensive option we also recommend the crock pot eight quart express extra large pressure cooker it's priced a little more than half what you pay for our winner around 77 now in our testing this model consistently produced excellent food while it's non-stick cooking pot didn't sear quite as well as a stainless steel pot in our winter the non-stick did mean it was easier to clean now your biggest sacrifice that you're going to make with this model is that its control panel is not that intuitive it has a jumbled mess of buttons for unnecessary preset cooking functions just ignore that and it's a solid choice and our best buy

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 263,291

Keywords: cooks illustrated, americas test kitchen, cooks country, equipment reviews, kitchen equipment, instant pot, multicooker

Id: Wxo2fMO8KRk

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021