How to Choose the Top Instant Pot for You?
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There are few things less satisfying than a delicious meal. Having a tasty lunch after a day of hard work is near perfection. Cooking that tasty lunch is not a simple task though. You need to have a lot of kitchen tools, experience, and talent to make something beautiful.
That’s what everyone thinks, right? Well, they are all wrong. All you need for a great and tasty meal is having an instant pot and buying the groceries from the store. Place them inside, set the timer, read a nice book until you wait, and after the alarm is set off, get up, put the food on the table and enjoy.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to find the best instant pot for your needs. There are many brands, but more importantly, there are lots of kinds, sizes and shapes. Here’s what you need to know about it.
What is an Instant Pot?
First, let’s break the terms. An instant pot means a pot in which food is cooked under pressure. The pot is sealed and using a special technique, it cooks the food without letting the important juices of the food to evaporate. Of course, there are options for those that are next level chefs, but this is basically it.
We all remember the old pot our grandma had. Well, technology has moved forward and today we have real robots in our homes doing delicious meals like pros. There countless options for what you want to prepare. Different features for different kinds of dishes.
For example, cooking meat in the traditional way requires a lot of experience, attention and multitasking. The pot does all this for you. Throw everything inside and forget about it. When the time for cooking it pass, just place it on the table. That’s what an instant pot is.
Size does matter
Choosing the right pot size is not hard if you know how often and for how many people you’ll use it. If you have a family of 2 and you rarely have guests in your house, you don’t need the biggest pot in the store. Some would ask why not? Well, the reason is practical, you’ll have to stuff the whole pot with food or wait too much time to get it done. Read this article to see how much we eat.
Pots usually come in three main sizes. The 3, 6 and 8 liquid quarts. The 3qt is relatively small and unless you’re living alone, don’t buy this size. The medium or 6qt is suitable for typical families. You can easily cook meals for 4-5 persons in it. The largest one is for more people. Large families, restaurants and similar. The number, you probably see this, is the actual size of the pot and how much liquid it can fit inside.
Numbers and Letters are Important too
You probably noticed that all Instant pots have similar names that differ in something. For example, there’s IP – DUO 30 V2 – 6in1. What does this mean?
IP is obviously Instant Pot. This is always the same. 30 is the size it can be 30, 60 or 80. It’s what we just talked about above with the liquid quarts. V2 can go to infinity, but it’s usually V1, V2 or V3 and stands for the version of the model. The last one, 6in1 means how many appliances from the kitchen it can replace. It is usually from 6 to 10 in 1. See this amazing article on how the US kitchen looked like over the years: https://www.cheatsheet.com/culture/average-american-kitchen-looked-like-over-the-years.html/
The word DUO is a part of the Instant pot models that are different by the features that have. There are LUX, DUO, SMART, DUO plus and ULTRA, and others. These are the most common even though there are more different features coming with every single one of them.
The simplest explanation of them would be:
LUX – best for beginners. It doesn’t have too many options, but it’s affordable and very easy to use.
DUO – an upgrade from the LUX. It has all the features from the previous, plus additional options.
DUO plus – has some extra buttons, a larger LCD screen, and a few more options.
SMART – This one is really high tech. It uses an app that can be controlled through Bluetooth.
ULTRA – if you’re a professional, this is for you. So many options.
