Joe Ray

The Instant Pot I brought to my mother-in-law's house saved Thanksgiving. This wasn't on purpose. I'd brought it up to her place to test it for this review, but when her oven died on Thanksgiving Eve, I got creative, whipping up Mark Bittman's make-ahead gravy in the Instant Pot using its sauté function. I also made Melissa Clark's pressure-steamed sour cream mashed potatoes, and pressure-cooked hard-boiled eggs that popped right out of their shells for deviled eggs. As for the turkey, a 3.5-pound boneless breast in the shape of a rugby ball, it went overnight in the Pot using the sous-vide function and came out as well as any I've ever made. It was an impromptu tour de force that put the multi in multicooker.

This was the Pro Plus, Instant Pot's newest and perhaps best pressure cooker yet. At $170, it's also the most expensive six-quart option. It does all the multicooker things: pressure cooks, slow cooks, sautés, steams, and sous vides, all with a pleasingly simple interface. Yet the Plus in its name—its raison de plus, if you will—is the “smart” or connected side of things, and for now, at least, that's a big Minus. By connecting the pot to a mobile app, you can unlock a “guided cooking” experience where you follow recipes on the screen as the app tees up the machine to execute each step. At least for now, that side of things should be ignored.

I'll start by telling you why and try to be brief, because there's good stuff to get to.

On the app, you can choose from an impressive stock of recipes—more than 1,000 and counting. The app allows you to choose how many servings you'd like and then scales the recipe up or down accordingly. Once you get cooking, however, problems crop up quickly.

I started with a pozole recipe that called for a pound or "about 1 3/4 cups, cubed" of pork shoulder, followed by an onion and three garlic cloves, both “chopped,” followed by canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce in a mysterious quantity of "3 (about 1.31 lb)," also chopped. Next, we're to “set aside” “1.56 lb (about 4 1/4 cups)” of hominy.

Hoo, boy. Frequent cookbook users will notice a lack of precision here. For those five ingredients, I had more than five questions. Here's one: How big are those cubes of pork? Pressure cooking can be a forgiving medium, but little cubes will dry out and too-large cubes might not get to that level of succulence we crave. Can that pork be bone in? Should it be trimmed? It didn't say. Have you seen other recipes where the amount of meat cubes are measured in cups? Now, how about that onion and garlic—are those chopped to the same size? That would be peculiar. What size chop, by the way? Shall we peel the garlic? As for that 1.31 pounds of chipotle in adobo … um, that stuff can get spicy! I'm more used to seeing a few tablespoons or even a couple of peppers in recipes, but how sure are we about that more-than-the-pork amount? Then there's that precise 1.56 pounds of hominy. If I look back up in the headnotes, I can figure out that it's canned, not dried, but how many cans is that?

Considering the Pro Plus currently comes in only one size—six quarts—and I often chose the default recipe size, all of these odd-amount measurements really stuck out.

I had similar issues with an eggplant, tomato, and chickpea tagine, where "grape tomato, 2 (about .63 oz)" turned out to mean two pints, eggplant were cut into “chunks,” and 2 1/2 teaspoons of kosher salt were also given as .25 oz, the latter being a unique format choice. How large are your chunks, dear reader? And are you using Diamond Kosher salt? Because if you're using the denser Morton's kosher with a measuring spoon, you might be putting more in there than they're calling for.

Here's a quote about recipes from page one in one of my favorite reference books, The Recipe Writer's Handbook, by Barbara Gibbs Ostmann and Jane L. Baker.

Think about what you're writing. Does it make sense? Is it logical? Do the steps flow chronologically? Should the sauce, which is listed last, actually be prepared first so that it can simmer while the cook is completing the rest of the dish? Are all the ingredients accounted for in the directions?

As the authors say, “It all sounds too simple, but it works.”

Yet as I looked at, then cooked through, the Pro Plus recipes on the app, it was pretty clear to me that I was struggling with the app because the recipes plugged into it were poorly written. I was able to make them work because I do this work for a living. Having written a cookbook, when I compared these to well-written recipes, they didn't make sense. The app’s existence is a partnership between Instant Brands and the smart-kitchen technology company Drop, where you could think of the latter as a sort of WordPress-style platform for connected cooking. 

That said, following the app to move the recipe along did not add much convenience either. If you have to stand near the machine to use the machine, you're not really speeding things along by putting a phone and an app between yourself and the machine. Often a phone, with all its distractions—Oh hey! A text from mom!—will slow you down. Plus, in the middle of the tagine recipe, I was given an "Instant Tip!" that gave me the option of changing horses midstream, offering the heretofore unmentioned possibility of either fast (pressure) or slow cooking, something far better teed up at the start of the recipe.

Normally, I might have continued for a few more recipes to make sure I wasn't missing something, but these two were from Urvashi Pitre, a favorite Instant Pot cookbook author, and Milk Street, one of the better-known names in cooking. If recipes from these two sources are that much of a mess, there was little chance I was going to do better elsewhere on the app.

Even worse, I started asking about how their recipe contributors were paid and got answers that had a peculiar amount of wiggle room.

When I asked if all of the recipe contributors were paid, a VP at Instant Brands, which makes the Instant Pot, said, "The recipes in our recipe library come from authors that are compensated." When I followed up and asked if they were compensated with actual money from Instant Pot, they responded that “All recipe authors are compensated, through direct payment, in exposure or with product.”

If this were my app, and I wanted it to be the best it could be, I would not be compensating people with exposure.

Here's a thought: just ignore the app. Disconnect the pot from the Wi-Fi. (If you need more encouragement to do this, check out Instant Pot's 8,000-word privacy policy. Yikes.) Next, grab a great multicooker cookbook and let this thing flex its muscles. Recent advances in multicookers, particularly those made by Instant Pot, will speed you along.

I made all kinds of great food in the Pro Plus: chicken stock, followed by lamb meatballs with farro from America's Test Kitchen's new Healthy & Delicious Instant Pot cookbook. I reverse-engineered Hugh Acheson's lentil soup with kale and sour cream recipe from his fantastic The Chef and the Slow Cooker, turning it into a pressure-cooked dish, then did a regular four-hour slow cook from the same cookbook with a lovely recipe for chicken stew with farro, tomatoes, olives, and feta. Then I saved Thanksgiving.

It was a great way to get to know the machine.

I was surprised by how much I liked the control panel, something I've never said about Instant Pots. Machines like these often have jumbles of buttons and useless presets. I always describe the display on my several-year-old Instant Pot Ultra as “fluttery,” part of what makes it unnecessarily difficult to control. With the Pro Plus, a slight improvement on the Pro, you choose from eight programs, like pressure cook, steam, rice, and sauté. Tap one and the center of the screen comes to life, with only information for that function. Tap pressure cook, for example, then touch the hours to set the hours, minutes to set the minutes, then pressure to set the pressure. It keeps things pared down and, I dare say, elegant.

The flat cooking surface was also a revelation. For years, Instant Pot and other multicooker brands have had pots with domed bottoms where the center is higher than the edge, meaning cooking oil pools around the edge while the center stays dry, which doesn't help cooking at all. Now, however, the bottom of the pot is finally, gloriously flat. Up top, the pot now has helper handles, making removal and maneuvering much easier. Even the fill lines on the side wall are more helpful than they used to be.

Most welcome was the notable bit of additional power—1,200 watts, compared to 1,000 or 1,100 watts on many of Instant’s other models, allowing for better browning, a key flavor-building step in many pressure-cooker recipes. The browning function is not great, mind you, but it's not bad, and is a significant improvement over its predecessors in the Instant Pot lineup. (Frankly, if there's a lot of browning to do for a multicooker recipe, I use a big skillet.)

I also like gaining the ability to preprogram the pressure release and the way the release itself is less dramatically noisy than many of its predecessors and its competition. The company’s designers have even rethought the little tabs-and-slots setup that allows you to lift off the lid and park it vertically on the top edge of the base.

Taken together, it's a set of upgrades that help establish the Pro Plus as the leader of a new generation of multicookers. Just leave it disconnected from the internet and trash the app, at least for now. Even without them, it can still save the day.