The Pro Plus is Instant Pot’s first smart home multi-cooker you can completely control from your phone. Does that make it the best Instant Pot of 2024? I turned the Pro Plus on to cook when I was curled up in bed — perfect for those cozy fall mornings where all you want is soup but you don’t want to get up. Obviously, you have to fill the pot with ingredients — I don’t think technology is quite at spontaneous manifestation yet — but from there, your phone is the key.
With 10 cooking settings ranging from slow cook to sauté, you can make a week’s worth of meals with just this one device. I tested the Instant Pot Pro Plus by making curry, yogurt, crème brûlée, rice, chickpeas, and more. Theoretically, that’s my entire week of meals — yogurt for breakfast, chickpeas for lunch, curry for dinner, and crème brûlée for dessert.
But does this $200 multi-cooker hold up under pressure? Could it replace sweating over a hot stove top entirely? I put the Instant Pot Pro Plus to the test making weeknight dinners, quick rice meals, and more. Find out what I thought in this comprehensive Instant Pot Pro Plus review.
Instant Pot Pro Plus review: Cheat sheet
- What is it? A Wi-Fi enabled smart Instant Pot with 6-quart capacity and 10 cooking presets.
- Who is it for? Busy families, meal preppers, batch cookers, people who want to put their feet up while an appliance does all the work
- What does it cost? $199 / £199
- What do we like? The range of settings, cleaning ease, and smartphone control
- What don’t we like? No temperature monitor, which would be useful for sous vide and yogurt
Instant Pot Pro Plus review: Specs
Instant Pot Pro Plus review: Price & availability
The Instant Pot Pro Plus is $199 from Amazon U.S.A. and £199 from Amazon U.K.. It’s available in just one color, but it’s the classic black, so it’ll look sophisticated in any kitchen.
The Pro Plus price puts it at the top end of Instant Pot’s collection: the $229 Instant Pot Duo Crisp is a combination pressure cooker and air fryer, and is the only Instant Pot product that costs more than the Pro Plus. You can get a pressure cooker for $99 if you go with the entry-level Instant Pot Rio, but it doesn’t have Wi-Fi connectivity, NutriBoost, or as sophisticated cooking presets as the Pro Plus.
Instant Pot Pro Plus review: Design, controls, smart features
The Instant Pot Pro Plus is a large kitchen appliance. With a 13-inch diameter, this is a bulky product you’ll need an entire countertop of space for. It’s about the same size as every other Instant Pot pressure cooker, so it’s not an outlier on that front, but do be mindful of the size.
In terms of aesthetics, this is a good-looking appliance. Gone are the haptic buttons from the older and cheaper models. The Pro Plus has a responsive touchscreen on the front which can select cooking modes and edit settings.
Now this is where the Pro Plus is one-of-a-kind in Instant Pot’s lineup: the smart connection features. It’s super easy to set up: you just download the Instant Pot app and link it up. You can even control the Pro Plus if your phone isn’t connected to your home Wi-Fi, so theoretically you could slow-cook dinner all day and select ‘keep warm’ to return home to perfectly cooked meals. Not only can you control the device from the app, but you can choose from thousands of recipes on the Instant Pot app. It’s not clear if these are community-made or curated by Instant Pot themselves.
Instant Pot Pro Plus review: Cooking performance
When the timer ends, the machine will automatically release the steam through the steam vent; there’s no manual release, unlike the Rio ($99) and Duo Plus ($129). The pulse steam release peaked at 82dB in testing, louder than both the Rio and Duo Plus.
Rice cooker
The first thing I cooked in the Pro Plus was white short-grain sticky rice. I filled the inner pot with about 18 ounces of white short-grain (sticky) rice and filled it with water, 1:1. I set it to natural release pressure on the "rice" setting; the default timer is 12 minutes, but I set it for 3 minutes, which was enough.
The Pro Plus takes about 10 minutes to preheat, which is a pain to wait through. But when the 3 minutes were up and the steam had released, I had fluffy sticky rice.
Slow cook
After making rice, I made a curry using "slow cook" mode. I filled the instant pot with my ingredients and set it to ‘slow cook’ for 4 hours. When the 4 hours were up, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. The flavors were so well-matured and full-bodied that I literally inhaled a bowlful.
Sous vide
As the Pro Plus doesn’t come with a sous vide trivet, I followed the instructions on the Instant Pot app to set up the sous vide. I filled the pot two-thirds full with water, laid an upside-down bowl in the inner pot, and placed a small plate on top. Then I placed the crème brûlée ramekins on the plate and set the "sous vide" for 60 minutes.
My crème brûlée never set properly, which I’ll attribute to user error, not Pro Plus error. But I wish the sous vide setting monitored the temperature of the water for a more reliable cooking experience.
Pressure cook
Cooking chickpeas from dry usually takes 8 hours of soaking and at least 1 hour of cooking on the stovetop. But to challenge the Pro Plus, I wanted to cook dried chickpeas on the "pressure" setting.
I poured 1 cup of chickpeas in the Pro Plus and filled it with 5 cups of water. I set the pressure to high, selected natural steam venting, and let it pressure cook for 40 minutes. After 40 minutes I had perfectly fluffy chickpeas with soft centers, so this was a big moment of celebration for me.
The Pro Plus vents steam automatically so there’s no manual release like on the Duo Plus ($149) or Rio ($99) pressure cookers. You don’t need to get your fingers anywhere near the steam release — this is probably the safest-feeling pressure cooker I’ve used from Instant Pot’s range.
Yogurt
The first thing I noticed when I set out to make yogurt was the lack of a "sterilization" setting. After a bit of research I discovered that you can sterilize glass jars using "pressure" settings, but as I didn’t want my glass to break, I just scaled with hot water.
I followed a yogurt recipe I found on the Instant Pot app. It was pretty simple: put milk in the inner pot, set it to "high" on "yogurt" for 30 minutes, then cool, then stir in yogurt culture, and return to the Instant Pot for 8 hours.
Eight hours later, I emptied the inner pot into a large plastic tub and put it in the fridge to set. In the morning, I had homemade yogurt! I was surprised and impressed with this setting, but it takes at least 18 hours of prep, cooking time, and setting time.
Sauté
I selected "sauté" from the settings menu and waited for the inner pot to preheat — about 5 minutes. Then I poured in a drop of oil and once it was hot, sautéed some white onion for five minutes. This is a great setting for either reducing stews after a slow-cook or sautéing the first ingredients before putting a soup on to slow cook.
Instant Pot Pro Plus review: Storage & maintenance
The stainless steel inner pot of the Pro Plus is dishwasher safe, so cleanup could be as easy as just putting the pot in the dishwasher. However, I always washed the inner pot by hand. I squeezed a little bit of dish soap in the pot and soaked it in warm water for around half an hour, then scrubbed with a sponge and dried it immediately. I would recommend this to maximize longevity.
As the Pro Plus is large at 13 inches tall, you’ll need to ensure you have the space to store it when you’re not using it. It’s too big to keep in my kitchen cupboards, so bear that in mind.
Should you buy the Instant Pot Pro Plus?
If you’re a smart home tech connoisseur, the Instant Pot Pro Plus is an excellent choice of pressure cooker. You can completely control the device from your smartphone, and you don’t even have to be at home to do that. But if you’re not a major proponent of smart home tech, you’d be better off with the cheaper Instant Pot, Duo Plus, or Rio. I’d buy the Pro Plus, though.
