Verdict: Cuts genuine hours off slow cooking for a modest price, as long as you learn what the timer is not telling you.
We cooked with the 6 quart Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1 three or four times a week for twelve weeks. Dried beans, stock, stews, rice, pulled pork, yoghurt and a good deal of weeknight improvisation went through it.
What we were testing
The multicooker category has a reputation problem: a lot of these machines are bought in January and live in a cupboard by March. Our question was not whether it can cook, it obviously can, but whether it survives contact with an ordinary week.
Scorecard
Assessed one criterion at a time over the full twelve weeks.
| Cooking results | 9.0 | |
|---|---|---|
| Value | 9.4 | |
| Ease of use | 8.0 | |
| Build quality | 8.4 | |
| Cleaning | 7.8 |
What works
It genuinely collapses long cooking times. Dried chickpeas with no soak took about forty five minutes to something better than tinned. A beef stew that wants three hours in an oven came out tender in around an hour including pressure up and down. Stock that we would normally leave overnight was done in the afternoon. This is the reason the machine keeps getting pulled out of the cupboard.
It is forgiving. Sealed pressure cooking is hard to burn and hard to dry out. Several meals that we would have ruined on a hob by wandering off survived because the pot simply held them.
Seven functions in one housing is honest. Pressure cooking, slow cooking, rice, steaming, sautéing, yoghurt and keep warm all work. The rice function produced consistent results after one calibration attempt, and the yoghurt setting, which we expected to be a gimmick, made good yoghurt repeatedly.
The value is hard to argue with. It costs a fraction of the premium multicookers and does the central job, pressure cooking, just as well. For most households this is the model to buy rather than the expensive sibling.
The stainless inner pot is the right choice. No coating to scratch off, dishwasher safe, and you can scrub it without guilt. Machines at this price that use non stick liners age far worse.
What does not work
The displayed cook time is not the real time. A ten minute programme is ten minutes at pressure. Getting there takes another ten to fifteen minutes depending on how full and how cold the contents are, and releasing pressure naturally takes longer again. Nobody tells you this on the box, and it is the single most common reason people feel misled. Budget thirty minutes for a ten minute recipe until you know your own machine.
Sauté is weaker than a hob. Browning a large batch of meat takes several rounds, and if you crowd it you get grey meat and a scorch warning later. We now brown on the hob and transfer, which slightly undermines the one pot promise.
The lid has nowhere to go. There is no hinge and no rest, so a hot, wet lid ends up on the worktop. Later models solved this. This one did not.
The sealing ring holds onto smells. After a few curries, the ring carried the scent into the next thing we cooked. Spare rings are cheap and we ended up with one for savoury and one for sweet, which should not be necessary.
The interface is dated. Button labels do not map cleanly onto what you are actually cooking, and the manual is a necessary companion for the first fortnight.
Who it suits
Anyone cooking from raw ingredients on weeknights, households that eat pulses and cheaper cuts of meat, and anyone who wants the results of long cooking without being home for it. If you mostly reheat or cook quick pan dishes, it will not earn its worktop space.
Conclusion
The Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1 earns 8.6, and the score is mostly about value. It does the hard job well, costs little, and after twelve weeks it was still in use rather than in a cupboard, which is the real test in this category. The deductions are for friction rather than failure: a timer that hides the preheat, a sauté function that cannot quite keep up, a lid with nowhere to rest, and a sealing ring that needs managing. Learn those four things in the first week and this is one of the best value appliances you can put in a kitchen.
Tested independently by the J2proxy review desk. We publish drawbacks in every review. Brands can submit a product for testing at quanho@gmail.com.
