The Duo Nova comes with a stainless steel inner pot with sealing ring, steam rack and extra seal ring, which is handy as the silicone tends to pick up odors.

Electric Pressure Cooker, Smart Cooker, Multi - Instant Pot Electric Pressure Cooker, Smart Cooker, Multi - Instant Pot

The programs are interesting innovations, but just like those in other multi-cookers we’ve tried, they mostly feel a bit gimmicky. One-Touch Smart Programmes: Revolutionize the way you cook with one-touch programs: Soup/Broth, Meat/Stew, Bean/Chili, Slow Cook, Sauté, Rice, Porridge, Steam, Yogurt, Multigrain and Poultry. In just one hour, it cooked 500g of lamb’s neck to perfection – this included 13 minutes of preheating, 25 minutes of cooking and 22 minutes of “natural release” depressurising. models come with 13 programs: Soup/Broth, Meat/Stew, Bean/Chili, Slow Cook, Saute, Rice, Porridge, Steam, Yogurt, Keep Warm, and Pressure Cook.Smart Program timed cooking presets let you “set it and forget it,” freeing you to do other things while the Duo cooks your dinner safely and quickly, with minimal mess and easy clean up. The multigrain setting also caused a lot of steam to spew from the release valve in its first couple minutes at pressure, perhaps because the program undergoes more complex calibrations. However, if you’re willing to spend that little bit extra, you’ll get your hands on a high-quality, versatile multi-cooker. Performance wise, it produced some very impressive results with many of these settings, with the Duo Crisp’s air frying, pressure cooking and sautéing drawing particular praise.

Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1 Smart Cooker, 3L - Pressure Cooker Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1 Smart Cooker, 3L - Pressure Cooker

We slow cooked our beef chili for six hours on the ‘more’ setting and the result was a delicious meaty chili with soft beef.

It’s a dab hand at cooking rice, too, and has a number of preset functions to help you get it just right. We check how easy the pressure cooker is to set up, how clear the instructions are, including safety information and any pictures or diagrams. The delay start comes in handy if you want to get your dish prepped and ready but don’t want it to start cooking quite yet.

Instant Pot Duo Nova 7-in-1 Smart Cooker, 5.7L - Slow Cooker

Next, I tested the Steam function to steam some green beans; I noticed the majority of beans were overcooked, soggy and lacked the firm and crunchy texture of steamed vegetables. You can switch between three modes – pressure cooking, air frying and steaming – as well as 11 different cooking functions. We look at the time it takes to drop after all three of our cooking tests and work out which ones are the quickest and slowest.Convenient and Customisable: The Instant Pot Duo can remember how you cook and which smart programs you use most often. We’ve seen this on other multi cookers such as the Tefal 45-in-1, so it doesn’t seem like too much to expect from such a premium model.