 Welcome to Road Gear Reviews. I'm Julie from RV Love and today I'm reviewing the Instant Pot IP Duo Six Quart Pressure Cooker. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Road Gear Reviews. Again I'm Julie from RV Love and today I'm talking about the Instant Pot and if you haven't heard about it everyone's been talking about it. We've had ours for about six months and we're here to talk to you about the features of this Pressure Cooker and what we like about it. So what is an Instant Pot and what does it do? This is actually a seven in one multi-use programmable pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, saute, yogurt maker and warmer all in one. So let's start off with the specs and the size of this unit. It's made of stainless steel and is about 13 inches by about 12.6 inches by a little over 12 inches and it weighs about 13 pounds. So not the lightest appliance but when I think about how many other appliances this replaces in my RV it's actually not too bad because this has replaced several other appliances that we used to use. So let's take a look at what comes inside the Instant Pot. This is actually the six quart. It does come in three sizes at three six and eight quart and we got the middle size being the six quart. If you're a family you're probably going to want to consider the eight quart larger size especially if you like leftovers. So a lot of people are nervous about using a pressure cooker because we used to think about what it was like in our mom or grandmother's pressure cooker and they kind of got very very loud and sparked steam everywhere and was very easy to get burned. Well there are a lot of safety features built into the Instant Pot to prevent that happening. The only thing you really need to be a little careful of when using an Instant Pot is when you're opening and closing the vent. Just don't do it with your bare hands. Some recipes call for a natural release where the pressure will naturally release after the meal is finished cooking. You could also use a dish towel to release the vent or I like to use my little silicon trivet holder here that I usually use to put hot pans on and that's what I use to stop myself from getting burned but this is not anything like the pressure cooker that your grandma used to have. So this is safe and easy to use and nothing to be scared of. So as you can see there are buttons on the front that really clearly show what type of food it's for whether it's soup, meat or a stew, a bean or chili dish, poultry, you can slow cook, saute, pressure cook, you can use manual buttons to set it up any way you like. There's a timer of course, rice, multi-grain, porridge, steam, you can even make yogurt in the Instant Pot and of course there's a keep warm setting as well. These little silicon rings can sometimes absorb the odours of food that you're cooking but they're very easy to replace and inexpensive. You can just get those on Amazon. So it's a stainless steel cooking pot with food grade stainless steel and a three ply bottom to ensure even cooking. So the Instant Pot comes with accessories including a stainless steel steam rack with handles, a rice paddle, a soup spoon, measuring cup, condensation collector and a recipe booklet. One of the reasons the Instant Pot has become so popular is you can use it to cook just about anything for one pot easy cooking especially if you have a busy life or on the go. For us living in an RV we're limited with space and weight so the less number of appliances we can carry that can do the most functions the better it is for us. So that's one of the reasons we love our Instant Pot. We use it to cook rice, quinoa, hard boiled eggs, stews, soups. You can even make desserts in this and I've actually tried a pretty amazing cheesecake that a friend made in his Instant Pot that I'm definitely wanting to try. So aside from the convenience of one pot cooking one of the things we really like about our Instant Pot is you can just set and forget. For example when we used to make quinoa we'd have to be over the stovetop watching it for about 15 minutes while it boiled. Now we can put it in the Instant Pot set it for one minute. It takes still around the same amount of time 15 to 20 minutes to cook but we don't have to be standing over the stove tending to it the entire time while it's boiling. So we can just set it in there set it for one minute and by the time it gets up to temperature cooks for the minute and then releases the pressure it's about 15 to 20 minutes but we can just set it up walk away set and forget it which is really really convenient. You can also preset your Instant Pot with a timer so you can set it up to start cooking at a certain time so if you know you're going to work for the day you can pop everything in here set the timer and have it ready for when you come home. And one of the differences of this compared to a regular slow cooker is it does have a saute option so if you want to saute your onions or saute or brown your meat before putting everything else into the pot you can do that all in the one Instant Pot before you add the rest of your ingredients and set it to cook. The great thing about this is it's really consistent and predictable results every time you cook. You can cook on low pressure high pressure and you can set it manually to however long you want to cook it for. So it speeds up cooking time by two to six times and uses 70% less energy. Meals cook in a fraction of the time they used to with a regular slow cooker and it's super easy to clean because you just have the one inner stainless steel pot to clean. The 24 hour timer allows for delayed cooking and the brushed stainless steel exterior is fingerprint resistant. So what do we really like about the Instant Pot? We like that we can use it for so many functions. This one kitchen appliance can do so many different things that we previously would use a slow cooker, a rice cooker, sauce pans for. Now we can just use this for so many things that we used to use other appliances for and reduce the number of items we carry in our RV kitchen. We love being able to just set and forget whether we're home in the RV or whether we're out we know that it's safe and it's not any risk of causing fire. It's virtually noiseless except for when it beeps to tell you when the cooking is done and when you release the vent for the steam to start releasing. So what don't I like about the Instant Pot? I think the two big things for me would be the weight. This weighs about 13 pounds which is about double my previous slow cooker slash rice cooker appliance which is really nice and light. So that is one thing I would like to see it a little lighter probably because I tend to get it in and out of a cupboard fairly often. If this lives on your countertop in your kitchen that's not going to be an issue for you. The other thing I'd like is a slightly longer power cord. You can see the length of the power cord right here. It's probably just over a meter or three feet long. I probably like that to be at least six to 12 inches longer just to give a little bit more flexibility on where I can position that for where we're planning on cooking. So that's about it for our review on the Instant Pot today. It's very easy to follow with the instruction booklets and of course there is loads of information on the internet about this. Just google Instant Pot and a recipe for just about anything you can think of and you'll find it. So today I'm going to show you how this works by cooking a chicken fajita recipe that I found online just today. So I've already pre-prepared the ingredients. Got my chopped chicken fajita sliced chicken breast here topped with some fajita seasoning. Throwing all of the vegetables on top. I've got onions and bell peppers here, some garlic, tomatoes and some lime juice. Pop the lid on top, lock the lid into place, set the valve to seal. So this recipe says to either use the poultry setting which would be 15 minutes or I can use the manual setting for eight minutes on high. So this is on you can see low pressure, high pressure. I'm going to take this down to eight minutes and show you how fast. There you go it started. So it's going to take a little bit of time to get up to pressure and then when it gets up to pressure it'll cook for eight minutes and then it will stop and beat and then we'll use the quick release method to release the vent valve over here. There are two ways to release the vent. One is the natural pressure where you just leave it to come down to pressure in its own time or the quick release which means you turn the valve toward you to open that up and that is when it does steam and sputter a bit but that's why you need to use a dish towel or something to stop you from getting a burn from the steam. So we're going to leave this for a little bit and we'll be back in probably 10 or 15 minutes or so when this is finished cooking and show you how it turns out. Alright so this is in the final minute just a word of warning this is really hot up here on the lid so just be really careful not to touch that. Only touch the handle. As you just heard that beep several times to let you know the cooking was done it's now going into a timer mode so we will now instead of the numbers counting down to say it's still cooking that I will start going up to say how long it's been sitting in the warm mode. Now let's release the valve I've got a kitchen towel I'm going to move this turn this forward to the front of the Instant Pot. You've got called the quick release. So you saw how quick that was I'd say about 15 minutes with the eight minutes of cooking and the time it took to get up to pressure I didn't time it exactly a couple of minutes to let the valve release probably about 15 minutes it has cooked a whole chicken fajita meal inside one pot. So let's take a look inside. So there you have it Instant Pot Chicken Fajitas this is going to be delicious in some tortillas you could even serve it on rice and of course with some refried beans that would be pretty tasty. Well I hope you enjoyed this review and found it helpful if you have any questions be sure to put them down below we'll be happy to answer them and we'll put the links to this six quart and the other sizes at the Instant Pot is available in down in the video description and if you have any other suggestions for products you'd like us to review here on Road Give Reviews just let us know in the comments below so until next time we'll see you on the road