Why You Should Never Cook Burgers In Your Instant Pot

Instant pots are a godsend and are suitable for preparing a huge variety of dishes. If you're hosting a dinner party and need to cook lots of delicious meat in a short span of time, an instant pot is your best friend (via Delish). Want something super basic like mac and cheese? Your cooker will take care of that for you. A fan of the device wrote on Reddit that an instant pot is great for making stock. "It's a great rice cooker, yogurt and tofu maker, beans, soups especially things like lentil and split peas. Tough cuts of meat made soft and shreddable without hours of braising, the list goes on and on," they wrote.

Another home cook agreed and said that the cooker saves a lot of time when you're trying to prepare stock from scratch. However, not all dishes work well when you're using an instant pot. Burgers, for example, definitely aren't the best idea if you're looking for crispy patties.

Per Food & Wine, instant pots are just not able to replace traditional tools such as cast-iron skillets when you're preparing burgers at home. One of the major problems here is that you do need to keep checking your patties, something that you don't necessarily do when you're cooking with an instant pot. Additionally, the results are average at best: mushy burgers that seem overcooked and feel unsatisfactory.

"If you have to bring your barbecue game indoors, burgers will fare best in a cast-iron skillet," dietitian Elle Penner explained. There you go. When it comes to burgers, nothing beats the classic options. As a Redditor pointed out, burgers aren't time-consuming anyway and wrote about a negative experience. "I cooked ground beef in it once for a pasta sauce, and it was pretty gross [in my opinion]," they commented. Doesn't sound too appetizing, does it?