The Pot Roast I Stopped Dreading on Busy Weeknights

For a long time, pot roast was a Sunday thing in my house. Not because it is difficult. Because it takes the whole afternoon and you have to be in the building while it does. I spent twenty years with a round slow cooker on the counter, and I liked it fine, but it owned my day. If I wanted to run to the store, I had to be back before the roast dried out.

I bought the Instant Pot Duo 6 quart last October. I had been circling it for a couple of years and finally got tired of my own excuses. The slow cooker went to my daughter Karen, who uses it more than I ever did. The Instant Pot lives in the pantry closet now and comes out two or three times a week, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it went. An appliance that lives in a closet and still gets used that often is doing something right.

The first thing I made was a chuck roast, about three pounds, with onions, carrots, potatoes, a cup of beef stock and a spoonful of tomato paste. I want to be straight with you about that first one. It was not as good as my slow cooker version. The meat was fine. The carrots were softer than I like. That was my doing, not the machine's. I cut them bigger now and I put them in later, and nobody at my table has complained since.

Where it earns its keep is a Tuesday. I start it around four and we eat at six. I do not stir it, I do not check it, I do not stay in the room. The lid locks, and the listing says more than ten safety features plus overheat protection, which matters to me more at sixty-four than it would have at forty. Gary does the dishes most nights, and even he has stopped grumbling about this one.

Things I do not love, because there are always things. It weighs 14.6 pounds. Lifting it out of a low pantry shelf with two hands is not my favorite part of the evening. It measures 12.2 inches deep and 13.38 inches wide, so it takes real counter space while it runs, and on my eight feet of counter that means moving the toaster. And it puts a lot of steam into the kitchen. In July I set it by the sink and open the window.

Thirty-five minutes under pressure for a three pound chuck roast, and I am not in the kitchen for any of it.

Dried beans were the surprise. I used to buy canned because I could never remember to soak anything overnight. Now a bag of dried pintos goes in with water, an onion and a bay leaf, and they come out tender without me planning a thing. The Instant Pot has quietly replaced a few canned items in my pantry, and that is a small grocery saving every week.

Rice took longer to get right. The rice program works, but I had to stop treating it like a stovetop pot and trust the thing. Once I did, it was consistent every time, which is more than I can say for me on a stove. The first month was trial and error overall. I overcooked a chicken. I undercooked beans once and had to run the whole cycle again, which is a longer evening than it sounds. The buttons are not self-explanatory and the little manual is thin, so I taped a note card inside a cabinet door with the times that worked for us. That card is the entire learning curve.

Cleanup is the part I did not expect to be easy. The inner pot is stainless steel and comes clean with a soapy cloth unless I scorched something, and the sealing ring lifts out. The ring does hold on to the smell of a strong chili for a while. I keep a second one for desserts, which sounds fussy until you have made a yogurt in a ring that still smells like garlic.

Soup and stock are where it beats what I had before. I used to simmer a chicken carcass on the stove for a whole day and the kitchen smelled like it for two. Now the stock is done before the evening news is over, and I strain it and freeze it in containers. Same result, none of the babysitting. That is the whole pitch, really.

The listing says it cooks for up to six people. For the two of us I make a three pound roast and there is plenty left for the freezer. On the Sundays when the grandkids come there are six at the table and the same pot handles it without me dragging out a second pan. That is the reason it earned a spot in this kitchen instead of staying a closet ornament.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you that this is not a fast machine. It is a machine that gives you your time back, and those are different things. If you are home all afternoon anyway, your slow cooker is perfectly good and you already own it, so do not spend money to fix a problem you do not have. But if you are the one doing the cooking after work, and the choice some nights is between a real dinner and eggs again, the Instant Pot is the reason we stopped having eggs again on Wednesdays. Give it a month before you decide. The first two meals will not be your best. The third one will. And measure your counter before it arrives, because this thing is a foot wide and it is not going to live in a cabinet if you want to use it.