Our Favorite Pressure Cooker

The six o’clock question in our house—what is for dinner when nothing got thawed—used to send Mom into a quiet panic most weeknights. Feeding eight people on a night that got away from you is a math problem, and takeout for a family this size adds up fast. We needed a way to get from frozen chicken to actual dinner without a two-hour head start.

The answer that stuck is the Instant Pot Duo Plus, the 9-in-1 pressure cooker. On the busiest nights it takes dinner from frozen to done in about half an hour, which is the difference between a real meal and another pizza order. It also handles the slow-cooker, rice, and yogurt jobs we used to keep separate gadgets for, so it quietly cleared a whole shelf of single-use appliances out of our cabinets.

We compared it against a bigger multicooker and a plain stovetop pressure pot, and the Duo Plus won on the balance of size and simplicity. The stainless insert wipes clean instead of staining like our old nonstick pots, the presets mean nobody has to babysit it, and at around $70 it earns its counter space several nights a week. For getting a family of eight fed on a chaotic weeknight, it is the one we actually reach for.