Cooking, and Reporting, in the Thrall of the Instant Pot

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One of the perks of being a technology columnist is getting to test lots of gadgets before they’re available to the general public. As a result, my apartment has at times resembled a Best Buy showroom. I have installed Bluetooth door locks; Wi-Fi-connected lights that can be turned on and off by talking to my Amazon Echo; and a remote-controlled bidet on my toilet. (Don’t ask about that last one.)

But of all the hardware products I’ve used this year, my favorite wasn’t the iPhone X or some newfangled VR headset. It was a $99 electric multicooker called the Instant Pot, made by a tiny Canadian company called Double Insight.

It’s become a viral phenomenon online, and has inspired a legion of devoted fans who call themselves “Potheads” and hang out in a Facebook group with 850,000 members. On Black Friday, the Instant Pot was one of the top 5 sellers on Amazon. It’s this holiday season’s must-have gift — a Furby for foodies — and it seemed to come out of nowhere.

Recently, I decided I wanted to know more about this strange little gadget. So I emailed Robert Wang, the Instant Pot’s inventor and the chief executive of Double Insight, to ask if I could visit the company’s headquarters in Kanata, a suburb of Ottawa, for an article this week.

Mr. Wang seemed surprised. (Ottawa in December is not exactly a dream destination for journalists.) But he agreed to host me, and give me a peek at the company’s inner sanctum. I arrived on a warmer-than-expected Wednesday, and we spent nearly four hours talking about Mr. Wang’s upbringing in China, his Ph.D. in computer science, and how he spent $350,000 of his own savings developing the Instant Pot after being laid off from his technology job in 2008. He also told me about some unorthodox ways people are using their Instant Pots, like the arts-and-crafts buff who creates sculptures out of popsicle sticks, and uses her Instant Pot to steam the sticks to make them bendable.

In addition to being a hit product, the Instant Pot is also a fascinating business story. These days, most big hardware advances come from companies like Apple and Samsung, which have thousands of engineers and billions of dollars to spend on research and development. But Instant Pot, which has only about 50 employees and never raised outside funding, has been able to reach enormous scale with none of those advantages. It’s a testament to the power of word-of-mouth marketing, and proof that not all useful innovation comes out of Silicon Valley.

The column I’ve written for the Times since last summer, called “The Shift,” is an attempt to make sense of all of the seismic changes happening in the business-and-tech world. That includes both addressing the big topics on everyone’s radars (last week, I wrote about how wrong I’d been about Bitcoin) and ferreting out this kind of story, which more often goes ignored.

I should admit upfront: Unlike my colleague Melissa Clark, who saw the Instant Pot’s virtues well before I did, I am not an accomplished cook. I spent most of my 20s as a five-days-a-week Seamless junkie, and started learning how to cook for myself only in the last year or two. But since I got an Instant Pot as a gift last summer, my kitchen game has leveled up considerably.

The Instant Pot’s main draw is its pressure-cooking function, which can cook unsoaked beans or soften tough cuts of meat in a half-hour or less. But it can also sauté, steam, and slow-cook, and its idiot-proof interface is perfect for … well, me. It’s now my go-to device for weeknight dinners — in the past few weeks, I’ve used my Instant Pot to make green Thai curry, butternut squash risotto, and a reasonable facsimile of a beef bourguignon.

By the way: The best use I’ve found for the Instant Pot is cooking raw beets. Beets are the greatest vegetable on God’s green earth, but roasting them the conventional way takes hours and gets red stuff all over your hands. Now, I just put a few beets in the Instant Pot with a steamer rack and an inch of water, turn on the high-pressure mode, and wait 20 minutes. They come out warm and soft, with skins that slip right off. No more red hands!

Normally, I’m skeptical of new product hype. The tech industry has an ignoble record of overselling its innovations and making even the smallest incremental advances seem like huge leaps forward. (How many times have I been pitched a “world-changing” start-up that turns out to be “Tinder for insurance agents” or whatever?) But in the Instant Pot’s case, I had already spent several months experiencing the product’s benefits, and talking to Mr. Wang convinced me that this device might represent an actual, lasting shift in the way people cook and eat.

In addition to making me more useful in the kitchen, the Instant Pot also has a calming effect on my frazzled, tech-addicted brain. Partly, it’s because cooking dinner is one of the only times of day that I’m not fidgeting with my phone or looking at the news. But it’s also the device itself. When you finish pressure-cooking a meal in one, you open a little valve on top, which produces a soothing hissssssss for the next few minutes while the pressure releases. It’s become my version of a meditation bell.

I’m still not a good cook. But I’m a lot better than I was. And for that, I have Mr. Wang’s invention to thank.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a beef stew to make.