Instant pot and slow cooker in one

An electric pressure cooker, like our favorite Ninja Foodi Pressure Cooker Steam Fryer (available at Amazon for $349.99), can transform a weeknight dinner routine. Meals that used to take an hour now take 20 minutes, and recipes that once dirtied all of your pots and pans now only require you to wash a pot, a lid, and a cutting board.

Electric pressure cookers—also known as multicookers—are countertop appliances that combine the functions of an old-school stovetop pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, yogurt maker, and more in one unit of efficiently released pressure. It allows you to cook almost anything you’d like in a single pot, from boiled eggs to entire dinners, quickly and without overheating in a pot.

Since these devices can do so much, we put major brands like Ninja and Instant Pot to the test against other manufacturers to see who really makes the top appliance. While Ninja has earned the title of our best overall, we also love our best value pick, the Chef's IQ (available at Walmart), for its minimal design and customizable cook functions.

Credit: Reviewed / Tim Renzi

The Ninja Foodi Pressure Cooker Steam Fryer is the best multicooker we've tested.

Credit: Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser

The Chef iQ is designed for chefs by chefs, and it's our pick for best value pressure cooker.

Other Pressure Cookers We Tested

How We Tested Pressure Cookers

The Testers

Hi, I'm Jenny! I'm a professional chef, writer, founder of a nonprofit community think tank called Studio ATAO, and author of Mastering the Instant Pot. I've been a pressure cooker fan since way before Instant Pots were a thing

Pressure cookers have been a staple in my mother's kitchen for making flavorful stocks, tender braises, and creamy porridge for decades. In fact, it's the first appliance she bought for me when I moved to a new city after college.

And we’re Bethany, Cassidy, and Valerie. All of us love to cook but work full-time, so coming home and having to prep dinner and lunch for over an hour gets exhausting, fast. Needless to say, we're pressure cooker fans—and having each contributed to this piece more than once, we know our stuff.

Before selecting our final list of multicookers, we looked at a total of 20 Instant Pots and competitors. We passed over some of the earlier Instant Pots like the Instant Pot Lux, as the newer models offer features we wanted to check out.

Otherwise, we chose the ones with the best combination of high reviews, great features, and reasonable pricing. (If a multicooker was twice the price with half the features, it didn’t make the cut.)

We exclusively tested moderately sized 6-quart Instant Pots and other multicookers, although you can find many of these multicookers in 3- to 8-quart models. The 8-quart models are better for large families.

Credit: Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar

We like the Instant Pot Smart Wifi because it's a smart device with tons of features.

The Tests

To ensure each pressure cooker was a good all-rounder, we tried three recipe types in our first round of testing: a classic comfort food (chicken noodle soup), a date night special (saffron risotto), and a finicky breakfast bowl (yogurt from scratch).

We added a slow cooker chili in subsequent updates to see how these appliances measured up to a traditional slow cooking device. We used the same ingredients for each and took detailed notes about how easy or difficult it was to select the cooking functions and times, how the food came out, and how tough the pressure cooker was to clean.

We also noted any surprises. Did the milk heat up to the right temperature for making yogurt? Did the Instant Pot flash a weird symbol during cooking? Did the steam valve spray hot milk everywhere and startle us so much we accidentally threw a recipe book across the room?

For cleaning, we did everything by hand.

We also took into account how helpful the manual was (and how much we needed to use it while cooking), whether or not it came with a recipe book, whether or not you could manually set cooking temperature and pressure rather than rely on cooking programs, and whether or not those cooking functions worked as expected.

One of the nice things about these appliances is that with enough time spent consulting the manual and Googling your questions, you can figure out even the most confounding of tasks. That said, if a product left me wondering whether or not our food would be edible when it was finished, we took that into account.

How to Choose the Best Pressure Cooker For You

Size and Capacity

Most pressure cookers and multicookers come in a variety of sizes, so you can choose the best model for your family and living situation.

If you're typically only cooking for one or two, models that come in a 3 or 6-quart size should suit you fine. But if you're used to cooking for larger crowds, you'll likely need an 8-quart pot.

And be mindful that most of these cookers will take up lots of space on your countertop, and are likely too heavy to lift in and out of a cabinet after each use. Be sure your kitchen space allows for a mainstay like this before purchasing one.

Cooking Functions

Some of the latest multicookers offer as many as 14 different cooking functions—from sous vide to air frying to yogurt making. But is that something you'll really take advantage of as a home cook?

Consider how many cooking functions you'll want to use in your multicooker, and whether it's worth upgrading to the latest model. Similarly, if you're someone who loves making your own yogurt or bread in a multicooker, be sure to make sure the model you're eyeing has that capacity—not all of them do.

What Is The Difference Between A Pressure Cooker, A Slow Cooker and A Multicooker?

Given how many different types of kitchen gadgets are on the market these days, it’s helpful to know the difference between a pressure cooker, a slow cooker, and a multicooker.

In brief, a slow cooker—often referred to as a Crock-Pot—cooks or simmers food at a relatively low temperature for a long time. It’s frequently used to make stews, briskets, or anything that you might want to prep before heading out for the day and eat when you get home from work.

A pressure cooker speeds up this process by sealing food and liquid in a pot and using the trapped steam from cooking to quickly raise both the temperature and pressure. That makes them great for quickly making a meal that would otherwise take an hour or two.

Older pressure cookers used to be mostly stovetop models, but these days they’re largely electric and live on your counter.

Credit: Reviewed / Betsey Goldwasser

The Ninja Foodi Pressure Cooker are Instant Pot Ultra are both multi-cookers that can do a lot more than slow cook—the Ninja can ever air fry.

A multicooker is simply an electric cooking device that combines multiple functions, such as slow cooking and pressure cooking and yogurt making, into one device.

In our experience, most electric pressure cookers—including the Instant Pot—are actually multicookers. But before you buy one, make sure it has the functions that you’re most likely to use.

These gadgets are extremely versatile, and ideal for quick cooking when you don’t want to dirty all of your pots and pans—or don’t want to turn on your oven. They're also great for large families who need to cook for a lot of people at once.

(Looking for more tips? Here’s everything you need to know to use a pressure cooker).

More Articles You Might Enjoy

• The Best Slow Cookers
• The Best Rice Cookers
• The Best Toaster Ovens
• The Best Air Fryers

Meet the testers

Bethany Kwoka

Contributor

Bethany is a freelance contributor for Reviewed. An avid home baker and aspiring home cook, she reviews and writes mostly about kitchen gadgets (with the occasional fitness review thrown in). Her specialty might be fancy desserts, but she's never met a batch-cooked dinner recipe she didn't like.

Outside of her work for Reviewed, Bethany is a content creator working on clean energy and climate change at a regional non-profit and runs a tabletop game at her local comic book shop.

Cassidy Olsen

Contributor

@olsencassidy

Cassidy covered all things cooking as the kitchen editor for Reviewed from 2018 to 2020. An experimental home chef with a healthy distrust of recipes, Cassidy lives by the "Ratatouille" philosophy that, with a few techniques and key tools, anyone can cook. She's produced in-depth reviews and guides on everything from meal kits to stand mixers and the right way to cook an egg.

Valerie Li Stack

Senior Staff Writer

@

Valerie Li Stack is a senior staff writer for Kitchen & Cooking. She is an experienced home cook with a passion for experimenting with the cuisines of countries she's visited. Driven by an interest in food science, Valerie approaches the culinary scene with a firm grasp of cooking processes and extensive knowledge of ingredients. She believes food speaks to all people regardless of language and cultural background.

Monica Petrucci

Senior Staff Writer, Kitchen & Cooking

@monicatpetrucci

Monica is Reviewed's senior Kitchen & Cooking staff writer. A graduate of Emerson College, she's had her work published in The Boston Globe, Culture Cheese Magazine, Modern Luxury, and more. In her spare time, you can find her making coffee, practicing yoga, or falling down a TikTok rabbit hole.

Jenny Dorsey

Contributor

Jenny is a professional chef, author and speaker specializing in interdisciplinary storytelling fusing food with social good. She leads a nonprofit named Studio ATAO and runs her own culinary consulting business. Her food and work has been featured in outlets such as Food Network, Oxygen TV, Eater, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, among others. Her full biography, food portfolio, and bylines can be found here.

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