The Best Multicookers
Everybody loves a little multicooker magic. Plug one in, the pressure builds, and it makes all of your slow-cooker favorites—chili, ribs, mac and cheese, broths, and braises—in a relative heartbeat. The "multi" in multicooker means these countertop devices not only pressure cook but also sauté, steam, slow cook, and sometimes sous vide.
They've even been a Big Thing ever since the ascendance of the Instant Pot a good six years ago—long enough that we're thankfully starting to see something like Instant Pot 2.0, where pan bottoms are flattening and searing capabilities are a bit more … capable. If you're new to multicookers, those are the bells and whistles to seek out and pay more for.
Overall, pressure cooking isn't better than slow cooking and vice versa. If you're a morning person and want to get a slow cooker rolling when you wake up, dinner will be waiting for you at the end of the day. (We have a fantastic dedicated slow cooker at the end of this guide, just for you.) If you prefer to do everything when you roll in from work, a multicooker is the way to go. One great thing about multicookers is that they make both options possible.
Read some of our other buying guides for cooking, including our roundups of the Best Multicooker Cookbooks, the Best Cookbooks for Technique, the Best Chef's Knives, Best Grills, and the 7 Pots and Pans You Need in Your Kitchen.
What to Know When Shopping for a Multicooker
Seek Grace Under Pressure
There are all kinds of
Instant Potsmulticookers out there. Just because one of them has a Kleenex-esque brand name that (to some) represents the whole category, there is plenty of good competition. It's worth shopping around to see what suits you.Machines with a 6-quart capacity are pretty standard, and I really don't see the point of using anything smaller. Downsizing won’t save you much money, you can make small batches or double batches in a larger pot, and who doesn't love remembering they have homemade chili or soup in the freezer when making dinner just feels like too much work? If you cook a lot, consider the 8-quart size. It's worth the additional cupboard space, and that extra area on the bottom of the pan makes for easier sautéing and searing.
Not just pressure cookers, multicookers often advertise themselves as being 10 (or so)-in-one, with all sorts of presets like chicken, cheesecake, and brown rice. Ignore the presets. The important settings—or at least my favorites—are pressure cook (duh), slow cook, and sauté, along with useful second-tier functions like sous vide, yogurt, and steam. For now, the 1,200-watt models are where you'll get the best searing.
One suggestion before you buy: See how the control panel on the one you're considering makes you feel. Operating your multicooker shouldn't give you a headache, and Instant Pot and a few other brands are notorious for making machines that have overly busy interfaces with too many options. Over time, though, some of them have become more intuitive. Our top pick—an Instant Pot model—has controls that are impressively streamlined.
None that we've tested have apps or internet connectivity that merit use. If your multicooker urges you to download a mobile app, you can safely ignore all that. Stuff like multicookers with air fryer lids can also be avoided for the time being.
While rice made in a pressure cooker is excellent, I prefer owning a separate rice cooker, as there are a lot of multicooker foods that go great with rice, and rice cookers are far superior at holding rice for long periods of time.
Finally, if you're a seasoned pro and you're happy with the multicooker you already own, there's no overwhelming reason to swap it for a new one. Instead, do like my dad says and "drive it till the wheels fall off," then go ahead and grab one of these. Until then, use any extra cash to buy the good cookbooks that help you make the most of what you've got. My favorite cookbooks are listed at the end of this buying guide.
Our Top Pick
Instant Pot’s newest pressure cooker, the Pro Plus (Rating: 8/10, WIRED Recommends), is its most thoughtfully designed and most capable machine. It originally went on sale for $200 last year, but the price has dropped to $150 almost everywhere. That's a bargain for this easy to use countertop cooker.
I was surprised by how much I liked the control panel, which is not something I usually say about Instant Pots. You choose from eight programs, like pressure cook, steam, rice, and sauté. Tap one and the center of the screen comes to life, with information only 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 is 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. On the Pro Plus, however, the bottom of the pot is finally, gloriously, flat. Helper handles on the pot make removal and maneuvering much easier than the standard, which is no handles at all. Even the fill lines on the side wall are more helpful than they used to be. Most welcome is 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.
One thing to note: The Plus in its name—its raison de plus, if you will—is the “smart” or connected side of things. A companion mobile app unlocks a “guided cooking” experience where you follow recipes on the screen as the app tees up the machine to execute each step. However, the app is a mess. The instructions are far too vague, the quantities of ingredients it asks you to add are too mysterious, and all that guesswork leaves too much to chance. Here's my tip: Ignore the app and 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.) It's still a fantastic machine without the app.
The Best Budget Option
You may not recognize the name Zavor, but the company is a direct descendant of Spain's storied Fagor kitchen brand. Fagor went out of business in 2018, and its US employees started a new company, rebranding Fagor's products with the Zavor label and adding some modest upgrades. The Zavor Lux 6-Quart Multicooker (Rating: 8/10) was the first of this new crop of machines I tested. Even though it's several years old now, the Zavor Lux is still our top budget pick—especially now that its price has dropped to $90.
Its controls were easy enough to figure out, and when I worked through some of my favorite recipes from cookbooks written for slow cookers and pressure cookers, it delivered results that came out exactly how they're supposed to. The Lux worked well enough that if something started going sideways, I could tell whether the problem was with the appliance, the recipe, or myself.
There was even a degree of temperature control that I appreciate. Within a range, you can dial up or down its cooking temperatures, allowing you to tweak heat presets on everything from the sauté function (266 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit) to the brown rice preset (240 to 248) to the high-pressure cooking (240 to 248). It's an impressive improvement over the temperature customization offered on other, more expensive models. It doesn't sear particular well, or quickly enough—I was able to sear a chuck roast about three times faster using a Dutch oven on my stove—but in all other respects, it performs admirably.
Another Good Multicooker
The consistently solid kitchen product manufacturer Breville was early to the multicooker game. About five years ago, it released the Fast Slow Pro. That machine was something an experienced pressure-cooker user could bend to their will, but beginners likely found themselves out of their depth. The Pro now has a new sibling named the Breville Fast Slow Go (Rating: 8/10, WIRED Recommends). The six-quart multicooker is something of an update. It's roughly the same size as its predecessor, and it draws the same 1,100 watts. It still has a polarizing hinged lid that swings open from the right side like a submarine porthole. (I'm pretty sure the only reason it didn't bother me is because I'm a lefty.) The new model has a stainless steel pot, which is a big improvement over the Pro's nonstick version. And the interface got a makeover—an array of simple buttons surrounds a display with large numbers—that feels like a big improvement over the inscrutable Fast Slow Pro.
It has some drawbacks: The pot is not flat but domed, it doesn't sear as well as our top pick, and the $200 price is high. Those exceptions aside, it performs exactly as you'd expect when cooking from a well-written recipe. A finely chopped onion, for example, takes about three to five minutes to soften on the high-sear function, just as the cookbooks say it should. And while it's not new or specific to the pressure cooker, I'm happy to shower a bit of praise on the design of Breville's O-shaped plug, which gently discourages users from yanking on and damaging the power cord.
The Best Big Boy
If, like me, you have owned a multicooker since the early Instant Pot–craze days, you probably had a nice honeymoon period where you forgave its eccentricities because it made your curry in a hurry. The longer I had my 6-quart Instant Pot Ultra, the more I started to wonder why so many of them, regardless of brand or style, had domed cooking surfaces (high in the center, low around the edge) and why we tolerated their crummy searing. As time passed, I also realized I'd prefer the large, 8-quart size, and that anything less than a 6-quart, even for someone who lives by themselves, didn't make much sense.
Now, however, searing's a little better, and the advent of the new cooking pot found on a few new Instant Pot models is very encouraging. Just like the pot in the Pro Plus (our top pick above), the bottom of the Pro's pot is flat. The design also features the same useful helper handles for getting the pot in and out of the Pot, keeping burns at bay.
I tested the 8-quart model of the Pro and put that extra size to work, one day churning out lamb ragù for a crowd, the next taking advantage of that larger size to sous vide, something that feels like more of a gimmick in the smaller sizes. One night, I poured Hugh Acheson's blender barbecue sauce with cider vinegar and gochujang over a whopping 8.5 pounds of baby backs I'd crammed in there. Can I say the meat fell off the bone? It did. [Chef's kiss!]
Something Different
The first time I saw the 6-quart, 1,350-watt Zojirushi Multicooker EL-CAC60XZ (Rating: 8/10) I thought, "Damn, that's weird-looking." In a category famous for being Crock-Pot quaint or borderline ugly, this unit stood out like a UFO—like someone squashed an Instant Pot, stretched it wide, then clamped it shut with a fat-handled porthole. Something else I noted: It's not a pressure cooker but rather a slow cooker that also has some multicooker functions. It also makes yogurt, it steams, it makes rice, it has two simmer settings, and it keeps food warm.
Where most slow cookers have only high and low settings, Zojirushi’s slow cooker comes with four impressive, to-the-degree temperature presets. Unlike most multicookers and almost all dedicated slow cookers, this one can sear well. Not perfectly, but well. With searing options of 350 degrees Fahrenheit or a no-slouch 410, it's a nice development, considering how important a good sear often is to slow-cooker fare. After searing the meat for a pork stew or a coq au vin, I had great success adding all the other ingredients to the pot and just letting it go—slow and low—for as long as the recipe required.
What my time with the Zojirushi really reminded me of was how the battle between slow cookers and electric pressure cookers really shouldn't be a battle. It's certainly great to be able to blaze through dinner prep and have super-fast pressure cooker dinner from your Zavor or Instant Pot, but sometimes it's easier to start something just before you go to bed and let it cook overnight or bubble away while you're at work. Cooking with a pressure cooker is quick but quite hands on; slow cookers invite you to enjoy what you’re doing and even chill a little.
You'll Need Some Cookbooks
Multicooker cookbooks in North America can have a weird sameness to them: chicken soup, chili, mac and cheese, repeat. Ugh! Dig around a bit and you can find more diverse and just more interesting stuff out there.
Indian food is huge in this realm—check out some of their Facebook groups—and remember that if you already own a favorite slow-cooker cookbook and have a bit of ingenuity, you'll be able to adapt most, if not all, of the recipes in it to work in your pressure cooker.
The top picks from my full list of recommended cookbooks are Multicooker Perfection ($12) from America's Test Kitchen for the classics, Melissa Clark's Dinner in an Instant ($12) for more exciting recipes, and Urvashi Pitre's Indian Instant Pot ($11) for fast and very tasty food from the subcontinent. If you want to eat well and chill with the slow-cooker set, get Hugh Acheson’s The Chef and The Slow Cooker ($28).
Comments
Back to top
Wired Coupons
Exclusive 10% Off Squarespace Promo Code
10% off Dell Coupon Code for New Customers
Samsung Promo Code: 10% off TVs
10% off Canon promo code with upgrade
Exclusive NordVPN Coupon: 76% off
LG Promo Code: 20% Off Your First Order