3 Thoughts on the Instant Pot

Like most of modern society, I received the much-lauded Instant Pot as a gift this past Christmas. Although I did ask for it.

I'm noted among my friends and coworkers for my apathy towards cooking and figured the world's newest kitchen gadget might light a fire in me (pun 100% intended) to build some more interest in the ancient practice. The Instant Pot delivered on this promise in droves, but I'll save the fandom for Buzzfeed.

Instead, I want to note a few aspects of Instant Pot's design that I've been mulling over with co-workers that I feel have been mostly lost in the wider conversation about this thing.

So, at the risk of over-thinking it, here's three thoughts I've had on the Instant Pot in the past few weeks:

The Instant Pot is wonderfully opaque

Although it's well designed, the Instant Pot is undoubtedly opaque. As you pull it out of the box, it's monolithic size and half-a-dozen warning labels in bright colours imposes a certain complexity that I've never really seen in a kitchen product before. It quickly dawns on you that this is a tool that you'll have to learn, more in-line with a manual-shift car than a toaster oven.

This opacity tightens as you follow the carefully worded instructions for your first 'test run': getting roughly 1.5 cups of water to get up to pressure (show me another kitchen gadget that makes you do a 'test run' first). And so you learn the machinations you need to go through to get the Instant Pot to function: always pour in at least 500ml of water, ensure the seal is clear of food debris, make sure the release is set to 'sealing', etc. I was genuinely surprised that the whole thing didn't explode in my face after going through all this, but it totally works and the self-satisfaction is not unlike your first clean gear switch - a feeling of pseudo-mastery over the machine.

The Instant Pot brokers in time-saving convenience, but it demands your attention first.

The Instant Pot forces foresight and planning

For poor cooks like me, foresight in food preparation doesn't extend much beyond the grocery list. I typically hop into the kitchen and just start putting things together with poor instincts. This often leads to two inter-related challenges:

• I struggle to time my food preparations correctly leading to a wide swath of over and under-cooked things as I get impatient
• I can't leave things 'alone' in the oven or covered pots, often because I'm not totally sure if I'm cooking them 'right' leading to lots of peeking and prodding - especially meat

The Instant Pot (and I assume most pressure cookers) forces you away from these sorts of habits out of necessity. Once you put something into the Instant Pot and dial in a time, you have no option, but to wait and see what happens. There's no 'oven light' in pressure cooking and certainly no taste tests. You just have to sit there and hope you thought through the details correctly.

For me, this 'feature' (if you could call it that) has encouraged considerably more careful cooking. I find myself often scanning through the instant pot cooking times list and several dozen community recipes before I attempt bolder tasks like cooking a whole beef roast in the thing in 70 minutes.

This 'forced foresight', I think, enables the Instant Pot's real magic moments that earn it such high praise. Moments where you unseal it after 40 minutes of pressure cooking on a recipe you've never tried before and find some of the best tasting food your own two hands have ever put together. It's a repeatable moment of delight most designers dream of creating once in a lifetime.

The Instant Pot isn't like other American kitchen gadgets

Despite being a Canadian product and a (seemingly) North American fad, the Instant Pot has many small design details that seem uncommon for most American kitchen appliances and gadgets: it features a dense grid of square plastic-coated buttons with minimal visual hierarchy, plays a cute jingle backwards or forwards when you open and close it respectively, and comes with several flat plastic scoops. All of these design details are features often seen on mass market rice cookers: a kitchen appliance staple in South-East Asia (I would have to do more research to see if these design principles carry to other South-East Asian kitchen gadgets ).

The Instant Pot becomes this interesting amalgamation of these design standards and North American ones: with its black plastic and stainless steel shell. In a world where my parent's brushed aluminum toaster has a 'little bit more' button and the Magic Bullet has no interface at all, the Instant Pot flies in the face of these over-simplified tools. It's got complexity, but still looks half-decent on your counter-top.

As a side-note, I'd love to do some more research/reading on this third point to learn more about how appliance design standards differ in different parts of the world. I wonder if it affects the way we choose to cook?