Instant Pot Rio review: This pot is Rio-lly good

The Rio is Instant Pot’s successor to the hugely popular entry-level Duo multi-cooker. With seven cooking presets and two sizes to choose from (Rio at 6QT or Rio Wide at 7.5QT), the Rio is a super-versatile appliance that, if you’re anything like me, will change how you cook entirely. The brand’s entry-level pressure cooker, slow cooker, steamer, yogurt maker — to name a few — might even be good enough to be one of our best Instant Pots. 

Which is really annoying, because I just bought a cast iron casserole dish. But now I have an Instant Pot, so the hours that I previously spent sweating over a stove top have been offloaded onto a piece of technology. And what a piece! 

I spent hours making everything from chickpeas, to soup, to steamed veggies, to eggs in the Rio. But were the chickpeas fluffy enough? Was the slow-cooked soup full of deep, infused flavors? Did the eggs have gooey, jammy yolks? Find out what I thought of the brand-new Rio in my Instant Pot Rio review. 

Instant Pot Rio review: Cheat sheet

• What is it? Successor to the Instant Pot Duo 60 Duo 7-in-1 with 7 cooking presets and two size options.
• Who is it for? People who don’t need settings like sous vide and cake, but still want a multi-purpose Instant Pot.
• What does it cost? 6QT Rio: $99/£99. 7.5QT Rio Wide: $129/£149.
• What do we like? How fast and effortlessly it can make a meal: all you do is put in your ingredients and let it do the work.
• What don’t we like? How long it takes to preheat, which is a wider Instant Pot problem, not just a Rio problem.

Instant Pot Rio review: Specs

Instant Pot Rio review: Price & availability

The 6 QT Rio is $99 at Amazon U.S. and £99 at Amazon U.K. The 7.5QT Rio Wide is $129 from Amazon U.S. and £149 from Amazon U.K.. The Rios are an upgraded, modernized version of the entry-level Instant Pot Duo 60 (from $99) but share the same price point. In the U.K., the 6QT is called Multi-Cooker 5.7L and the 7.5QT is the Multi-Cooker XL. We tested both, but used the Rio Wide for our cook tests.

Instant Pot Rio review: Design & controls

The Rio comes in two sizes: the 6QT (5.7L) version and the 7.5QT (7.1L) version. I used the 7.5QT version for testing, but the 6QT Rio looks almost identical, and works exactly the same. The 6QT is taller and slimmer, and the 7.5QT Rio Wide is wider and shorter. The front panel relies on graphic icons rather than text legends. Thankfully, the user manual explains all of the icons, I found myself referencing the manual every time I cooked something. I’m not entirely sure why Instant Pot has done away with the text labels, as I find them useful on its other appliances. 

The Rio is an upgraded successor to the Duo — and it looks so much better than its predecessor. Gone is the steel plating of the old Duo, replaced by a sleek monochromatic black finish. There’s no dial, with the device instead relying on a tactile touchpad for adjusting settings. While I miss the text label, overall the design of the new Rio is attractive enough for it to be forgiven. 

Instant Pot Rio review: Cooking performance

The Rio has seven settings: steam, saute, slow cook, pressure cook, egg, yogurt, and keep warm. Steam release after cooking peaked at 84.7dB, making it louder than the Duo Plus Whisper Quiet but quieter than the Pro Plus. 

Steam

The first setting I tested on the Rio was the steam function. As I was making a slow-cooked butternut squash soup, I decided to start by steaming the butternut squash. I laid out my squash on the included trivet (essentially a grill that raises your food off the bottom of the Instant Pot), poured in about 2 cups of water (the minimum liquid you can use with the Rio Wide — 1.5 cups for the standard Rio) and set it to steam for 10 minutes. Like all other Instant Pots I’ve tested, the preheating time is not included in the overall cooking time, so this took about 16 minutes from start to finish. But when the time was up, I opened the lid to reveal beautifully soft, vibrantly orange squash. The steam setting got a big ‘yes’ from me.

There’s no rice setting on the Rio, but I wanted to test if it could cook rice. I put 1 ½ cups of rice into the inner pot, filled it with cold water up to my first knuckle, then put the rice on ‘steam’ for 14 minutes. Unfortunately, when it finished the rice was effectively rice mush. Edible but not enjoyable. I think you’d need to play around with water levels and time to get the best result. To try and get decent rice, I filled the inner pot with water and rice at a 1:1 ratio, about 2 cups of each. After a lot of trial and error, I finally settled on the best way to cook rice in an Instant Pot. Here are my well practiced tips on how to make rice in an Instant Pot.

Saute

Next in my soup recipe came sauteing. I turned on the Instant Pot to ‘saute’ for 6 minutes, but I realized when I was cooking that this didn’t actually count down — so what’s the point of the Rio making you choose a time length? It doesn’t matter if you time it on your phone, but is still a strange oversight. I put in about a tablespoon of olive oil, then waited a couple of minutes for it to get hot. Then I tossed in my red onion and sauteed it until it was nice and browned. I realized it was getting a bit too hot so I adjusted the temperature using the temp icon on the left side. Then, following my recipe from the Instant Pot app, I added spices, butternut squash, apple, and veggie broth, which brings me to my next setting. 

Slow cook

I was making vegetable soup, and decided that two hours was a good time to slow cook my meal. I switched easily from saute mode to slow cook mode and secured the lid. Then, I set the Rio to slow cook for two hours. Two hours later, I opened the Instant Pot to reveal perfectly tender vegetables and a deeply colored broth. After blending everything up in my Nutribullet Smart Touch, I promptly devoured the delicious soup. Slow cooking was a success. 

Pressure cook 

Next, I gave the Instant Pot Rio what seems an impossible task to anyone unaccustomed to pressure cooking: cook unsoaked dried chickpeas in just 40 minutes. Most recipes say you should soak chickpeas for at least eight hours, but I skipped that to save time. So I poured in about 1 cup of chickpeas and 5 cups of water. 

I was skeptical, but the Rio did everything I asked and more. As if by magic (or a really good pressure cooker), I opened the lid after 40 minutes to reveal fluffy chickpeas with soft centers and silky skin. So, you don’t need to soak your chickpeas with the Instant Pot Rio. 

Egg

The Rio’s default egg setting runs for five minutes. To test it, I filled the bottom of the Rio Wide’s inner pot with the minimum 2 cups of water and placed a single egg inside. After five minutes, I released the steam and retrieved a very hot but perfectly hard-boiled egg. And because of the pressure inside the Rio, the shell came off super easily. I wanted to see if I could get a soft-boiled egg too, so I put another egg in for three minutes. To my dismay, the three-minute egg wasn’t cooked in the middle and was almost impossible to peel, so I wouldn’t recommend this setting for anything other than hard boiled eggs.

Instant Pot Rio review: Storage & maintenance

As it’s a one pot appliance, cleanup of the Rio is straightforward. Once the pot is cool, wash it either in the dishwasher or with hot soapy water. Give the lid, sealing ring, and condenser catcher a clean after every use, too. As the Rio is 13.8 inches tall and the Wide is 16 inches wide, you’ll want to make sure you have enough space to store these appliances before you buy.

Should you buy the Instant Pot Rio?

If you’re after a versatile yet easy-to-use (unless you lose the user manual) appliance, the Rio line of Instant Pots is the perfect place to start. I adored the range of settings and the easy-to-clean inner pot. It’s dishwasher safe, too, for those days when you are so busy you barely even know what time it is. While it takes some experimentation to get things cooked perfectly, this is a must-have device for busy families or culinary explorers.