¶ Intro / Opening
Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.
I'm Mark Scarborough and together with Bruce my husband We have written three dozen cookbooks not counting Bruce's knitting books not counting my memoir not counting the books We ghost wrote for celebrities back in the day What 40 books total we've just turned in yet another cookbook book. And this is our podcast about food and cooking our passions in life. We have a one minute cooking tip about garlic.
We're going to talk about instant pots and all things pressure cookers and what in fact has happened to the instant pot. It used to be everywhere. And is it still not really, but we want to talk about that and we're going to tell you what's making us happy in food this week. So let's get started.
¶ Our one-minute cooking tip: Trash your garlic press and use a small hand-held grater.
Our one minute cooking tip. Trash your garlic press and use your small hold grater for garlic. Now, I want to tell you, you probably, if you listen to this podcast, you probably know that I was at one time in my life connected to an Italian immigrant family with first generation, I mean, real immigrants. I mean, the people I was connected with were the first generation born in the U. S. and their, the aunts and uncles and all that were Italians. And they thought garlic presses were from Satan.
Well, they're horrible. Well, yeah.
just
I can tell
you that they thought that was the most American affectation they could imagine.
they're horrible. And I'm not suggesting use a microplane. Just the small holes of a box grater, or if you have a single handheld grater, it's the one with the small holes. It creates beautiful, small little pieces that retain all the juice and all the oil that's inside that garlic. Instead of a press, which just crushes it and squeezes all that good stuff out.
if you don't know that a press removes the juice in the oil, it still gets in there somewhat if it flows through the press, although the press gets gunked up with stuff, but it makes the oil and many of the flavor esters separated from the pulp of the garlic. It's a problem. A garlic
ever try and clean one of those
And Bruce is suggesting that you use a handheld grater. Grader with a fine grating surface on it. Before we get to the next part of our podcast, all about instant pots and what's happened to them, where they came from and well, now where they went. Uh, let me say that we do have a newsletter. It comes out. Well, Maybe about once a month right now.
If you don't know, my mom is in serious health decline and I have been back and forth from St. Louis dealing with her and trying to help her as she approaches her 92nd birthday. So, uh, maybe the newsletter doesn't go out quite as often as it once did. But if you
Let's do one just about her.
Great. If you want to sign up for that newsletter, which is not necessarily connected to this podcast, but has recipes, cooking tips, and even things about our lifestyle. You can find that on our website, cookingwithbruceandmark. com or just bruceandmark. com. There's a way to sign up for the newsletter there on the splash page. And let me just remind you that neither I, nor the mail service provider can capture your name, nor your email. I pay extra for that.
So you can sign up there for that newsletter, which I promise will soon go out again. All right, let's turn to the question. of instant pots and pressure cookers and what we've seen over the years with them.
¶ What happened to the Instant Pot? It went from an international craze to a much smaller presence. We rode this roller coaster. We're here to report back, from our initial reserve about the pressure cooker to our giant, big-selling Instant Pot bibles!
Before we talk about what happened to the Instant Pot, for those who aren't familiar, what is an Instant Pot? An Instant Pot is Well, you know, people who even use it don't even understand sometimes that it is a pressure cooker. And a pressure cooker is just a device that has a tight, Tight fitting lid and
a small escape,
a little small escape valve and the food must have a lot of moisture so that it comes to a boil and then a gasket seals it. It pulls that moisture and steam in, the lid gets even tighter, pressure builds, the temperature rises, and things cook much faster.
I think, I think one of the most, uh, surprising things to me over the years, and you may know that Bruce and I have written several Instant Pot books, we'll talk about that in a minute, we wrote the Instant Pot Bible, and Instant Pot Bible Next Generation, and a copycat for restaurant, copycat recipes for the instant pot and a book all about going straight from your freezer to the instant pot. So let's just say we went all in on the instant pot.
But one of the things that surprised me in following the social media groups is how many people didn't think that the instant and by the way, it is an instant pot, not an insta pot. How many people didn't think? No, that the instant pot was in fact a pressure cooker.
you tell them that and they'll go, no, it's not, it's, it's, it's an instant pot.
I know
a pressure cooker. And the thing about a pressure cooker is Your food is basically being boiled to death. That's what happens in a pressure cooker.
Right. Um, can I, can I just go back to that point for a minute? I think that this speaks to the brand's success because the brand was so successful instant pot that he overrode even the definition of what it was. And. It's brand instant pot became what it was. I know this sounds really weird, but it became what it was More than a pressure cooker more than an electric pressure cooker My grandmother I used to pressure cooker all the time.
I grew up with them and my grandmother would oh, this will kill you She would set a pot roast to go in a pressure cooker and they would go off to church
the pressure cooker going.
I'm not making this up leaving it going and then come home to it still going on the stove. Anyway, it's crazy. I don't do that at home. No, I never do that. But my grandmother always used a stovetop pressure cooker. And of course, if you don't know, pressure cookers are extremely popular in Europe. In fact, when we were doing research for our Instant Pot books and even our pressure cooker book, we discovered that the Average, average Swiss household owns three pressure cookers.
That's the average. So that means that half the population owns more than three.
crazy? My grandmother also used a pressure cooker all the time for her tongue. That was her big
Oh, there you go. And you use a pressure cooker for tongue.
I use a pressure cooker for tongue, and I had a bunch of stovetop pressure cookers before Instant Pot came out. And then I actually did by a couple of electric pressure cookers when they first came out just to see the difference. And the basic difference between the stovetop ones and the electric ones is that the stovetop ones are designed to cook at a slightly higher pressure, so a higher temperature, and they actually cook faster than the electric ones.
But the electric ones are so easy and convenient, and you don't need to monitor the heat that at this point I have gotten rid of All of my stovetop pressure cookers, and I
You don't even have one of them left? I don't have
any of them. All I have are electric pressure cookers. I also like the variety of sizes. So when we started using the electrics, we had this idea that, wait a second, here's something that people are really starting to talk about.
We spoke with our publisher about writing the first pressure cooker book and Stimpot was just out. And, um, the publisher asked for what in publishing is called a category killer. That is a book that is so giant and has so many recipes that really any other book that comes behind it is dead because this thing has stopped the category. So we did, we, we wrote what became honestly a category killer in its day.
And it was a book in which every recipe told you how to do it in a stove top model and how to do it in an electric, the new fangled electric pressure cooker countertops. And here's the thing that this book sold. like crazy on QVC. We were on multiple times on QVC. It was even on without us with just the hosts selling It on QVC without our presence there.
Let me also just say it's called The Great Big Pressure Cooker Book in case you want to go and look at it. Right. It is still in print. It still sells.
it's still on. here was our decision. We saw the Instant Pot. It was brand new out. We got connected to the CEO of what then the CEO of Instant Pot. He sent us a couple. We looked at it and we dismissed it out of hand. We said it was a novelty toy because he didn't have the kind of
culinary credentials
of some of the other machines, but he had a lot of bells and whistles and buttons and you know, we were being very snotty and we're like, well, you don't need bells and whistles. You just need an on off
It reminded me of one of those children's toys that has all these buttons you could press that do nothing. And that was kind of what I thought, because the Instant Pot has a button for chicken and a button for beef and a button for soup.
The buttons on the Instant Pot, all bring it to exactly the same pressure. The only difference is the manufacturer has set timings at that temperature at that pressure. So that's the difference. As Bruce said, we kind of dismissed all that. I'll look at all these fancy buttons. Nobody needs this.
And yeah, we also dismissed Bitcoin
Bitcoin when it first came out We still dismiss Bitcoin because I still don't know what it is. I just can't. I'm too old to buy something that I don't understand what it is. So, um, so yes, we dismiss that too. So, we, did dismiss the Instapot. And then the book, the great big pressure cooker book sold really well. And the publisher came back to us and said, how about, well, different publisher. We jump publishers and they said, how about writing an instant pop book?
And so by that point we were, okay, we're
Yeah, we were in. At that point, I realized how popular they were, and we could do the same thing. Let's make a category killer that's just about the Instant Pot, and we wrote the Instant Pot Bible. And what we did differently in that book, and what I love about the Instant Pots are all the sizes they come in. So, we have a three quart, a six quart, an eight quart, a ten quart, and that's something I never had in my stovetops, and none of the other electric pressure cookers are.
So it was kind of cool to be able to play with
think that one of the things that's really interesting here about the Instant Pot and while we're talking about it is, The Instant Pot was really one of the first giant social media hits of kitchen appliances. And they went all in for influencers and social media advertising. And this is part of their success. They exploded on Facebook, on Instagram, particularly on Facebook, but also on Instagram. They exploded.
uploaded in the social media landscape, and they got influencers involved to make recipes, contribute recipes, et cetera, before influencer was even such a big name as it is now. And this is how they made their success is through social media connection. And they just overwhelmed the category. So when we published the Instant Pot Bible, the category was firmly established in social media circles.
Um, I just should tell you, in case you don't know, we were, of course, connected to the Instant Pot, and our contract with them actually stated how many times a week we could post. So they were taking people like us, cookbook authors, and they were limiting our access to allow just, um, you know, somebody making an Instant Pot stew at home to not be able to post. overrun by us.
And part of that is their social media presence was so popular that like, for instance, on Facebook alone, they had over 3 million people in their groups. That's a huge audience that we were trying to reach. And so they did have some power to try and control that. And it's fascinating also when they first started selling, they made a choice that the audience. The only place they were going to sell was Amazon. And that was a really strategic point.
Once it became super popular, then you can get them at department
stores. I think that is because, uh, Robert Wang came out of tech. He had retired from tech, the guy who essentially invented the Instant Pot and started the company. He came out of tech and I think he understood the power of tech more than maybe some traditional companies like Whirlpool or the traditional manufacturers. So he just decided to throw it all in for social media and for, uh, Amazon. But then, of course, they, began selling elsewhere and it exploded. And by
2018 in
the 2018 holiday season, this, this may be peak instant pot. The Coles, the department store claimed that they were selling 60 Instant pots per minute over Thanksgiving weekend of 2018. If you just think about that, you can see it's absolutely exploded across the landscape.
at that point, even QVC had instant brands create an instant pot just for them. So you can get an exclusive design instant pot just on QVC. And that was really good for us because then we were able to sell our book on QVC as well.
And, um, the brand exploded, and then here's what happened, and you may know this already. There's a lot of talk online about, oh, they got too popular. They overplayed their hand. They, uh,
it to too many other appliances. Right,
They got other appliances. They got a blender for a while and other stuff that they expanded to. All of that is not true. Here's the truth. What happened is that Instabrands, which is a Canadian company, Brands essentially, as you probably well know, was sold to, well, they were sold to an old manufacturing concern that owned corral, but when Pyrex, but really what it was sold to was the hedge fund that controlled Pyrex and corral, isn't
that the nature of business these days? Every company out there is now controlled by a hedge fund.
Wang made billions now. Well, I'm not sure he didn't make it with a B, but he made lots of money off the sale of instant brands.
and
he sold it. And then not to be gross, but just to tell you what happened. It's not that they overplayed their hand in popularity. This hedge fund that is behind Pyrex and Corel and other brands that owns them did what they always do. They took instant brands and they loaded it with debt. I mean, they just leverage that thing. out of oblivion into debt. They sucked that money, the capital off from the debt, and then put the company into receivership. And that's, that's exactly how it worked.
They loaded up with debt, pocketed the money of the debt, and then put it into
into,
bankruptcy.
And what happened after that is that this company that was now bankrupt, went on the auction block and was bought up. And it is now called Instant Pot Brands. It used to be Instant Brands. Now it's Instant Pot Brands, which tells you something also about their focus as a new company. That I expect it will be mostly just Instant Pots and not other appliances. And it is a standalone company under new ownership. So we'll see this.
This is exactly what Bruce and I saw happen with Craftsy. As you know, we recorded a lot of cooking videos for Craftsy. We have a lot of classes still up on Craftsy. Craftsy still exists,
It does.
but Craftsy was a standalone company in Denver started by a couple of, uh, retired tech post tech entrepreneurs. They started this company with all kinds of knitting and I don't know, furniture making and. Cooking all kind of DIY content and you could subscribe and get all these DIY classes and buy them.
And then that eventually grew exponentially and it got bought by NBC's parent company and NBC had this decision, Universal, yeah, the NBC had this decision that they were going to put their celebrities.
on it.
So we're going to watch Amy Poehler make a cake, I don't know. Like, I really don't care what cakes Amy Poehler makes, but okay, whatever. But I know I'm not the target audience for this. So, they were going to do that, that didn't really work. Then the thing got sold off, again, to a hedge fund. It got loaded up with debt, it got put into bankruptcy. And now it's out. owned by a small company in Minnesota, which is maintaining the Kraftsy brand, but the whole thing has shrunk dramatically.
They're not really creating a lot of new content. They're recycling their old content. You know, this is the thing. These things grow big. They attract the attention of venture capitalists and hedge funds. They get bought up. They get loaded with debt. They get put into bankruptcy, and then they re emerge as a much, much tinier entity, back kind of to the original focus, except smaller. And you can hear this with Instant Pot brands.
They're going to do away with, you know, the blenders and all this other air fryers and all this other stuff, and just really focus on the core business, which was the pressure cooker, the electric pressure cooker.
Well, it's interesting. During this sort of slow, decline in popularity of the Instant Pot over the last year, year and a half,
we
have actually noticed an uptick on the sales of our non Instant Pot pressure cooker book. So that great big pressure cooker book has actually started selling. more copies again, and we're selling fewer copies of the Instant Pop Bible. So it is sort of in real time. We're seeing that feedback of what's happening out in the world.
And it's, it's indicative. of, um, U. S. Canadian culture, I think. It's more U. S. than Canadian, but both together. It's indicative of the culture, and maybe even a little bit of the U. K. And that is this thing to, uh, what do I want to say, to run after the shiny new object. So here's the shiny new object. And people run after it and they embrace it and grab it and love it and hold it.
And then of course the shine wears off and something else shiny comes along like an air fryer or, you know, whatever else it is that that comes along. And that thing that used to be the hot it thing suddenly starts to fade away. And it. It is just the arc of so many, I think about, um, Ron Popeil and the thousands of things that Ron Popeil, the inside the egg, egg scrambler, think about the thousands of things that Ron Popeil made. What was it? Set it and forget it. The
Uh, the, it was some rotisserie
the rotisserie oven. You know, I mean, he rode those waves, Popeil did, made himself billions, riding those waves over and over and over again. Because it is the nature of, um, what do we want to say, a really highly developed consumer culture that you find the shiny new thing, you love it. And then, you know, it kind of runs its course and it falls back to a more moderating position. It's like, right, and then you have, you know, suddenly it's a much smaller thing, but it still exists.
Instant bots are still around. Malibu
Stacey has a new hat, and it's, you know,
most people are not going to get that reference.
It's a Simpsons reference. The references on this podcast are always from the
Okay. Most people are not going to catch that. Um, and even old people are not necessarily going to catch that. So, uh, but what Bruce is saying is that, that they change a little bit of something to make it shiny and new again, which they did, but there's not really anything left to change
They changed that entire thing. So many times they put so many new hats on it until there was nothing else to do.
Right, but that's not the reason it collapsed. It collapsed because of the nature of consumer society, and it collapsed because of hedge fund debt. And that's why it has kind of collapsed as it has. And, you know, I mean, I think that Instant Pots are great. I love them. When Bruce sings with his Baroque group, I make dinner after the concert for all of our friends who can't, uh, who can't come to his concerts. And I always make chilies and make a vegetarian chili and a meaty chili.
You know, I always make several different kinds of chili and I always drag out all the instant pots and I always make chili in an instant pot because it's easy cause I can get it out on the counter and get all the fixings out with chilies and I can make a big buffet and tada, I'm done and our friends are fed. So I love the instant pot for what it's worth, but again, it's, Giant fame has deteriorated partly from financial reasons and partly because of the nature of consumer society.
Well, I'm hoping that they are able to sort of resurrect their image a bit in this new Instant Pot Brands company because it is a good product. Um, as Mark says, we love them. My favorite thing to do in it is to take the Eight or the 10 quart pot, which are big enough to cook spaghetti without breaking them, and you could make a nice tomato sauce or a meat sauce, and you put the raw pasta right in that sauce. It cooks.
especially for like Cincinnati chili.
and it cooks in six minutes under pressure, and the pasta's cooked right in that sauce. Uh, yeah, I still love my Instant Pot.
Yeah, it's, it's a great tool in the kitchen, and part of what happened to it, you know, as it got increasingly popular, the word popular, Prolonging this bit to also say it became increasingly popular.
So people were trying to do Everything and it's about we would see videos of people claiming to fry chicken We can't fry chicken in a pressure cooker So, I don't know what little tricks they were using that suddenly there's fried chicken sitting there because in a steamy pressure cooker You cannot fry chicken. So people would just making videos like crazy claiming.
Oh, look at me I made you know something that we know why I made candy fudge in an instant pot and it's like Come on, give me a break. The
syrup and was a big thing.
Right, I remember
I tried cooking
iced tea. Remember the thousands of videos for iced tea in the instant pot?
there something about putting that teabag under pressure that helps?
I don't know. I really don't. I mean, I make, I make a lot of iced tea because I'm a southern boy and in the summer we drink a lot of iced tea around here. And it didn't take me any time to boil some water and pour it over teabags in the morning. So I don't know what the function of the instant pot is.
Well, it became people's
It did? wanted to be that was the success of the brand.
when you create a product that people want to identify with, boy, have you made a success. So when you reach that point, People want to do everything in it.
sure you know this, but it's, it's the, it's the dream of every brand is that you become, I mean, the famed one of this in modern culture is Apple, you become an Apple. Apple person. You have an iPhone. You have an iMac. You're an Apple. I'm Bruce and I are both Apple people. And it's not, we love apples, of course, but it's also something about us. It says something about who we are. It's the same thing. People who buy Teslas, right? It's supposed to say something about you. It's
the tribal quality we all have.
absolutely is. And the Instant Brands wrote that to great success and now, unfortunately, that success seems to be ebbing. Will it still be around? Yes. Will it be much, much, much smaller? Yes.
it will. But if you still have an Instant Pot, please keep using it. We use ours. There's plenty of resources out there, plenty of recipes, plenty of good stuff, including our books. So give those a look. And that is what happened to the Instant Pot.
So before we get to the final segment of this podcast, let me say that there is a Facebook page. group cooking with Bruce and Mark. There's also a TikTok channel cooking with Bruce and Mark. There's all sorts of ways to find us. There's even a small, it's really small Instagram feed cooking with Bruce and Mark. You can find us in any of those places. We are delighted to connect with you there right now.
We seem to be on a jag of posting recipes for various chocolate cookies, lots of chocolate cookies, particularly on TikTok. Uh, check that out. And we would love to connect with you in whatever way we can. Okay. The final. and traditional last segment of this podcast.
¶ What's making us happy in food this week: unexpected food pleasures and lemon marmalade.
What's making us happy in food this week? I'm going to start. So, here's what's making me happy. It's not actually a thing, it's an attitude. Um, we were invited to a friend's birthday party uh, this week as we're recording this. Uh, he's turning 89. And so, wow. So, we were invited to his 80th birthday party. 89th birthday party.
They were taking us and some other people out to dinner and they suggested we go to a restaurant that was connected to a country club, a public country club, a public golf course, and there's a restaurant connected to it. And both Bruce and me, as well as the other couple who was invited, were very sneering. We were so unbelievably sneering about being invited to the clubhouse of a public golf course. I know this is not paint us in a nice light and it shouldn't.
So we ended up going, of course, and we went to dinner with them. The place ended up being really nice. We had a really great dinner. We had a lovely booth that was like couches and a table that was really comfy. We had a great time together. The food was delicious. And all I can say is we had. Beautiful food, lovely time together and my food snobbery almost stopped me from having that good time. So, Mark, uh, learn to be better in the future. And that's making me happy in food this
Wow, what's making me happy seems so shallow compared to that. Lemon marmalade is making me happy.
Wow, I love lemon marmalade. Good
God. I made it yesterday, and I made about 18 jars of lemon marmalade. I'm going to be very honest, and I cheat, and I don't use lemons from scratch. There is a British. Product called home cook and they produce tins of ground up lemons with pectin and you just dump that in a pot with four pounds of sugar and some water and boil it up and there's your lemon marmalade problem is you cannot buy that product in the U. S. I
believe we believe it's illegal from some lemon board rules
You can't get it imported. Like if you go to Amazon UK, it tells you we cannot ship this to your area, but I found this in some DIY crafty store in the UK that ships to the U. S. and they clearly didn't know the rules and I bought a case and it just showed up in three days.
We used to have friends who would go to the UK, and we would always buy stuff. Oh, get us a can of this lemon for lemon marmalade, these lemons and pectin all mixed together for lemon marmalade. And they would come home with this giant 32 ounce can in their luggage for us, which was really, really generous. But then Bruce found a place that just sent it to us totally illegally.
So yeah,
we got to keep it. case of these cans.
We did. So I made like 17,
I love lemon marmalade, even I love marmalade and I love it more than orange marmalade because it's so sour and slightly more bitter and
more interesting.
Lemon desserts are just my kingpin. So lemon marmalade would be my kingpin. Delicious stuff. Okay, that's the podcast for this week. Thanks for being a part of our podcast landscape. We certainly appreciate your taking the time to be with us. thousand million podcasts out there, and we appreciate the time that you spend with us. Thank you for that.
Every week we tell you what's making us happy in food here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark. So go please to our Facebook group Cooking with Bruce and Mark and share what's making you happy in food there where we could see it, we could talk about it, and we might even make it if it sounds fabulous here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.