This might be our favourite thing so far this year. Slow cooker, soup maker, rice cooker, steamer and more.
The Instant Pot Duo Mini, a 3 litre electric pressure cooker. It’s magic.
Instant Pot Duo Mini 3L
Seven functions share one pot: pressure cook, slow cook, sauté, steam, rice cooking, yoghurt making and keep warm. That’s the “7-in-1” the box talks about, and it’s the same list on both sources, which is reassuring when a product has this many claimed uses.
On the worktop, it isn’t tiny, but it isn’t trying to be. Instant Pot’s own spec sheet puts the Mini at roughly 29cm wide and 28.5cm tall, which is about the footprint of a decent slow cooker rather than a whole shelf. The inner pot is stainless steel with a layered base, and the inner pot, lid, lid accessories and steam rack are all listed as dishwasher safe on the top rack. That matters more than it sounds when your sink doubles as your only draining space.
Three litres (close to 3 US quarts, which is how Instant Pot itself measures it) is proper small-household sizing. Think a stew for two, a pot of rice for two or three, or one batch of yoghurt, not a Sunday roast for eight. For one or two people, that’s usually the amount you actually want to cook, rather than a catering-size pot that never gets filled past halfway.
Worth the cupboard space?
For one or two people without the room, or the desire, for four separate single-job gadgets, swapping several machines for one is a fair trade. You do need to be comfortable with “does the job well” rather than “does it better than the specialist version”, for each of those seven functions. If that trade sounds sensible rather than like a compromise, a 3 litre pot is a sensible size to start with. It asks for one bit of worktop, not four.
A quick note on the pictures in this post: they’re illustrations of what this type of gadget generally looks like, not photos of the actual product, so whatever turns up at your door will look a little different in the details.
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