A few years back, in that now-forgotten time before Instant Pots[1] were a thing, I reviewed an electric pressure cooker[2] and struggled mightily with it. It was supposed to be a safe, fast way to speed up cooking and promised to make slow-cooker style dinners appear in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, stovetop pressure cooker cookbooks didn't really work for their slightly-less-powerful electric counterparts, and this one came with a mini-cookbook with recipes that tended to flop.
Flash forward to last fall when Instant Pot Mania was in full swing and I put the company's Ultra[3] cooker (a souped up version of their classic Duo[4]) at the top of my Christmas list. Once I popped it out of the box, though, I quickly realized that sub-par manuals and not-so-great included recipes are par for the course.
Multicooker Perfection: Cook It Fast or Cook It Slow—You Decide by America's Test Kitchen is out on April 17.
America's Test Kitchen
Turns out that Instant Pot is notorious for this, so much so that it's rumored to be reworking its manuals. The Instant Pot Community group[5] on Facebook is too much of a jungle for beginners, and while my friend Lylah secured an invitation for me to Facebook's secret Instant Pot for Indian Cooking group, it was clearly over my head.
While there is a mushrooming number of electric pressure cooker cookbooks out there (many with those awful, mansplainy covers[6]), it's hard to know which one will allow you to kick the tires and give you the foundation you need to bring this new tool into heavy rotation in your kitchen while making tested,...