Instant karma

Last year, my wife and I bought an Instant Pot. (If you’re already dreading the rest of this post, I promise in advance that it won’t be devoted solely to singing its praises.) If you somehow haven’t encountered one before, it’s a basically a programmable pressure cooker. It has a bunch of other functions, including slow cooking and making yogurt, but aside from its sauté setting, I haven’t had a chance to use them yet. At first, I suspected that it would be another appliance, like our bread maker, that we would take out of the box once and then never touch again, but somewhat to my surprise, I’ve found myself using it on a regular basis, and not just as a reliable topic for small talk at parties. Its great virtue is that it allows you to prepare certain tasty but otherwise time-consuming recipes—like the butter chicken so famous that it received its own writeup in The New Yorker—with a minimum of fuss. As I write these lines, my Instant Pot has just finished a batch of soft-boiled eggs, which is its most common function in my house these days, and I might use it tomorrow to make chicken adobo. Occasionally, I’ll be mildly annoyed by its minor shortcomings, such as the fact that an egg set for four minutes at low pressure might have a perfect runny yolk one day and verge on hard-boiled the next. It saves time, but when you add in the waiting period to build and then release the pressure, which isn’t factored into most recipes, it can still take an hour or more to make dinner. But it still marks the most significant step forward in my life in the kitchen since Mark Bittman taught me how to use the broiler more than a decade ago.

My wife hasn’t touched it. In fact, she probably wouldn’t mind if I said that she was scared of the Instant Pot—and she isn’t alone in this. A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature by Ellen Byron titled “America’s Instant-Pot Anxiety,” with multiple anecdotes about home cooks who find themselves afraid of their new appliance:

Missing from the enclosed manual and recipe book is how to fix Instant Pot anxiety. Debbie Rochester, an elementary-school teacher in Atlanta, bought an Instant Pot months ago but returned it unopened. “It was too scary, too complicated,” she says. “The front of the thing has so many buttons.” After Ms. Rochester’s friends kept raving about their Instant Pot meals, she bought another one…Days later, Ms. Rochester began her first beef stew. After about ten minutes of cooking, it was time to release the pressure valve, the step she feared most. Ms. Rochester pulled her sweater over her hand, turned her back and twisted the knob without looking. “I was praying that nothing would blow up,” she says.

Elsewhere, the article quotes Sharon Gebauer of San Diego, who just wanted to make beef and barley soup, only to be filled with sudden misgivings: “I filled it up, started it pressure cooking, and then I started to think, what happens when the barley expands? I just said a prayer and stayed the hell away.”

Not surprisingly, the article has inspired derision from Instant Pot enthusiasts, among whom one common response seems to be: “People are dumb. They don’t read instruction manuals.” Yet I can testify firsthand that the Instant Pot can be intimidating. The manual is thick and not especially organized, and it does a poor job of explaining such crucial features as the steam release and float valve. (I had to watch a video to learn how to handle the former, and I didn’t figure out what the latter was until I had been using the pot for weeks.) But I’ve found that you can safely ignore most of it and fall back on a few basic tricks— as soon as you manage to get through at least one meal. Once I successfully prepared my first dish, my confidence increased enormously, and I barely remember how it felt to be nervous around it. And that may be the single most relevant point about the cult that the Instant Pot has inspired, which rivals the most fervent corners of fan culture. As Kevin Roose noted in a recent article in the New York Times:

A new religion has been born…Its deity is the Instant Pot, a line of electric multicookers that has become an internet phenomenon and inspired a legion of passionate foodies and home cooks. These devotees—they call themselves “Potheads”—use their Instant Pots for virtually every kitchen task imaginable: sautéing, pressure-cooking, steaming, even making yogurt and cheesecakes. Then, they evangelize on the internet, using social media to sing the gadget’s praises to the unconverted.

And when you look at the Instant Pot from a certain angle, you realize that it has all of the qualities required to create a specific kind of fan community. There’s an initial learning curve that’s daunting enough to keep out the casuals, but not so steep that it prevents a critical mass of enthusiasts from forming. Once you learn the basics, you forget how intimidating it seemed when you were on the outside. And it has a huge body of associated lore that discourages newbies from diving in, even if it doesn’t matter much in practice. (In the months that I’ve been using the Instant Pot, I’ve never used anything except the manual pressure and sauté functions, and I’ve disregarded the rest of the manual, just as I draw a blank on pretty much every element of the mytharc on The X-Files.) Most of all, perhaps, it takes something that is genuinely good, but imperfect, and elevates it into an object of veneration. There are plenty of examples in pop culture, from Doctor Who to Infinite Jest, and perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that the Instant Pot has a vaguely futuristic feel to it. A science fiction or fantasy franchise can turn off a lot of potential fans because of its history and complicated externals, even if most are peripheral to the actual experience. Using the Instant Pot for the first time is probably easier than trying to get into Doctor Who, or so I assume—I’ve steered clear of that franchise for many of the same reasons, reasonable or otherwise. There’s nothing wrong with being part of a group drawn together by the shared object of your affection. But once you’re on the inside, it can be hard to put yourself in the position of someone who might be afraid to try it because it has so many buttons.