The Best Pressure Cookers in Canada of 2024

An electric pressure cooker, like our favourite, Instant Pot Ultra (available at Amazon) , can transform a weeknight dinner routine and expand your cooking program whether you're single or cooking for a large family. Meals that used to take an hour now take 20 minutes, and recipes that once dirtied all of your pots and pans now only require you to wash a pot, a lid, and your cutting board.

Electric pressure cookers—also known as multicookers—are countertop appliances that combine the functions of an old-school stovetop pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, yogurt maker, and more in one unit of efficiently released pressure. It allows you to cook almost anything you’d like in a single pot, from boiled eggs to entire dinners, quickly and without overheating in a pot. You can think of it as a one-stop-shop.

Since these devices can do so much, we put Instant Pot to the test against other manufacturers to see who really makes the top appliance. We judged them on ease of use, how tough they were to clean, how smooth the steam release valve was, and, of course, how well the food turned out.

(Looking for more tips? Here’s everything you need to know to use a pressure cooker).

How We Tested Pressure Cookers

The Testers

Hi, I'm Jenny! I'm a professional chef, writer, founder of a nonprofit community think tank called Studio ATAO, and author of Mastering the Instant Pot. I've been a pressure cooker fan since way before Instant Pots were a “thing”—pressure cookers have been a staple in my mother's kitchen for making flavorful stocks, tender braises, and creamy porridge for decades. In fact, it's the first appliance she bought for me when I moved to a new city after college.

And we’re Bethany, Cassidy, and Valerie. All of us love to cook but work full-time, so coming home and having to prep dinner and lunch for over an hour gets exhausting, fast. Needless to say, we're pressure cooker fans—and having each contributed to this piece more than once, we know our stuff.

Bethany tackled the initial pressure cooker research and product round-up in late 2017. Cassidy updated this article in December 2018 (almost a year after its initial publication) to include three new models, then Bethany came back to add a new slow cook test and four new models. Jenny completed the most recent round of major testing and Valerie rounded out the bunch by testing the new Crock-Pot (which is unfortunately not available in Canada).

Before selecting our final list of multicookers, we looked at a total of 20 Instant Pots and competitors. We passed over some of the earlier Instant Pots like the Instant Pot Lux, as the newer models offer features we wanted to check out. Otherwise, we chose the ones with the best combination of high reviews, great features, and reasonable pricing. (If a multicooker was twice the price with half the features, it didn’t make the cut.)

We exclusively tested moderately sized 6-quart Instant Pots and other multicookers, although you can find many of these multicookers in 3- to 8-quart models. The 8-quart models are better for large families.

The Tests

To ensure each pressure cooker was a good all-rounder, we tried three recipe types in our first round of testing: a classic comfort food (chicken noodle soup), a date night special (saffron risotto), and a finicky breakfast bowl (yogurt from scratch). We added a slow cooker chilli in subsequent updates to see how these appliances measured up to a traditional slow-cooking device. We used the same ingredients for each and took detailed notes about how easy or difficult it was to select the cooking functions and times, how the food came out, and how tough the pressure cooker was to clean.

We also noted any surprises. Did the milk heat up to the right temperature for making yogurt? Did the Instant Pot flash a weird symbol during cooking? Did the steam valve spray hot milk everywhere and startle us so much we accidentally threw a recipe book across the room?

For cleaning, we did everything by hand.

We also took into account how helpful the manual was (and how much we needed to use it while cooking), whether or not it came with a recipe book, whether or not you could manually set cooking temperature and pressure rather than rely on cooking programs, and whether or not those cooking programs functions worked as expected. All of these were important in assessing the overall ease-of-use for these pressure cookers.

One of the nice things about these appliances is that with enough time spent consulting the manual and Googling your questions, you can figure out even the most confounding of tasks. That said, if a cooker left me wondering whether or not our food would be edible when it was finished, we took that into account.

We also quickly learned that you should have all of your ingredients ready to go before even turning on your pressure cooker. These things work fast, so your ingredients should be prepped before you start.

What Is The Difference Between Pressure Cooker, Slow Cooker or Multicooker?

Given how many different types of kitchen gadgets are on the market these days, it’s helpful to know the difference between a pressure cooker, a slow cooker, and a multicooker. In brief, a slow cooker—often referred to as a Crock-Pot—cooks or simmers food at a relatively low temperature for a long time. It’s frequently used to make stews, briskets, or anything that you might want to prep before heading out for the day and eat when you get home from work.

A pressure cooker speeds up this process by sealing food and liquid in a pot and using the trapped steam from cooking to quickly raise both the temperature and pressure. Once the food is cooked, you can release the steam via a small valve, allowing you to open the sealed container. Pressure cookers are great for quickly making a meal that would otherwise take an hour or two. Older pressure cookers—think pre-Instant Pot craze—went directly on the stove, but these days they’re largely electric and live on your counter.

A multicooker is simply an electric cooking device that combines multiple functions, such as slow cooking and pressure cooking and yogurt making, into one device.

In our experience, most electric pressure cookers—including the Instant Pot—are actually multicookers. But before you buy one, make sure it has the functions that you’re most likely to use. For instance, if making yogurt at home is important to you, check to be sure your pressure cooker has that function (since making yogurt relies on a totally different capability than pressure cooking). These gadgets are extremely versatile, and ideal for quick cooking when you don’t want to dirty all of your pots and pans—or don’t want to turn on your oven. They're also great for large families who need to cook for a lot of people at once.

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Other Pressure Cookers We Tested

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