Review: Zavor Lux 6-Quart Multicooker

Unlike most Instant Pot adopters, my relationship with electric pressure cookers has been spotty. Like a bad lover, I sometimes wanted things that it couldn't give. Other times I felt like it had ginned up its Bumble profile a bit too much.

Here's an example of the latter: rice. I own a rice cooker and use it almost daily, yet I was led to believe I could ditch the machine entirely and make rice in my Instant Pot. Thing is, my rice cooker does a better job, and it's not that much slower. Plus, I often want to serve that rice with something I've made in the pressure cooker.

More than rice though, I've felt oversold on the electric pressure cooker (aka “multicooker”) as a place to sear food before pressure-cooking it. The searing function has been pitched as part of an effort to cook the whole meal in one pot. Who doesn't love ending the evening with fewer dishes to wash? But as someone who loves braising in my Dutch oven, using the multicooker's relatively small cooking pot to do the searing for a daube or coq au vin made everything feel so damn slow. I noticed this with my Instant Pot Ultra and when testing the Instant Pot Max. Nothing “max” or “ultra” about 'em—trying to get a good sear on anything took too long, and I hoped a new pressure cooker I was about to test could conquer that problem.

Ideally, searing happens quickly, creating a dark Maillard reaction that gives the exterior of the protein a lovely brown color, hopefully without cooking its interior. Without enough power, as is often the case with electric pressure cookers, that can't happen or it takes forever. Plus, even with a larger 6-quart “cooking pot,” an 8-inch pot diameter means there's not a lot of surface area to cook on and you'll sear in batches, which also takes forever.

To get the job done quickly, my workaround has always been to use my big Dutch oven or cast-iron skillet, but that one-pot dream persisted. I was excited to try the new Zavor Lux multicooker, a direct descendant of the Fagor Lux. (Spain's Fagor went out of business last year, but US employees started a new company, essentially slapping a Zavor label on its defunct predecessor's pressure cooker and adding some modest upgrades.)

With a sick sweetheart, I started with the chicken and dumplings recipe from Melissa Clark’s lovely Dinner in an Instant. It begins by browning 3 1/2 pounds of chicken pieces, then cooking them in chicken stock fortified with delicious braising essentials like carrots, celery, onion, and garlic.

I set the Zavor next to my Instant Pot, turned both on to their highest searing temperatures, heated the oil, and patted down my thighs and drumsticks.

I may have blown a fuse once or twice during the testing, but the short version of the story is this: I had high hopes of the Zavor beating the pants off of my Instant Pot, but frankly, it only did a slightly better job. And with two nearly identical dueling pots doing the job of one, the batch problem remained. (If I'd only been using one pot, I would have had to do a couple rounds.) From there, I sautéed my veggies, added the stock and chicken and went about my soup.

Next, I plowed ahead with just the Lux, making Clark's lovey mushroom, pancetta, and pea risotto. In this recipe, a handful of pancetta cubes are crisped up then set aside, and the rendered fat is used to sauté the mushrooms. Here the Lux did just fine—as would an Instant Pot—with no need to resort to a skillet. I also noticed that it worked well enough that if something started going sideways, I could tell whether the problem was with the appliance, the recipe, or myself.

Building speed and confidence, I switched it up a bit and attempted an advanced move, using Hugh Acheson's The Chef and The Slow Cooker, which does a surprisingly good job of breaking the mold of what these cookbooks tend to propose: chili, mac and cheese, ribs, pot roast, risotto, et cetera. Technically Acheson's recipes are made for slow cookers, but slow cooker and pressure cooker recipes are birds of a feather. With a bit of cross-referencing using trusted pressure cooker cookbooks, you can have a lot of fun and expand your repertoire.

I started with his ribollita, a minestrone descendant that's a bit of a prep monster with big amounts of small-diced onions, celery, and butternut squash. The sautéing capabilities were plenty sufficient for all of those veggies. (I'm sure it would have been fine in the Instant Pot too.) When it was done, I reflected that it was likely one of the nicest vegetarian dishes I'd ever made.

The Lux had performed admirably through my testing, and there was even a degree of temperature control that I began to appreciate. Within a range, you can dial up or down its cooking temperatures, allowing you to tweak heat presets on everything from the sauté function (266 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit) to the brown rice preset (240 to 248) to the high-pressure cooking (240 to 248). It's an impressive improvement over the temperature customization that my high-end Instant Pot Ultra offers.

Less impressive, however, was what I figured would be the definitive test. Looking to quantify searing capability, I cranked both the Lux and the Ultra as high as they would go, emulating that searing setting, added a cup and a half of canola oil to each pot, and let 'em rip for a while, taking the temperature every few minutes to get a sense of what was happening. I discovered neither one did a great job. The Zavor was set to 356 degrees and tended to be hotter than that, but over the course of about 20 minutes ranged from the 340s to 380. The Instant Pot stayed pretty consistently in the 360s, but it was set to 338.

I also wanted to check the Zavor's slow-cooking capabilities. While America's Test Kitchen straight-up advises against slow-cooking certain recipes in the Instant Pot in its excellent book, Multicooker Perfection, the Zavor came up aces on one of those, chile con carne. Even a double batch came out fantastic.

Despite this, it became clear that the Zavor wasn't head-and-shoulders better than the Instant Pot, only marginally so. Its controls were easy enough to figure out, and it did what it was supposed to do. It edges out the Instant Pot, but only by a nose.

For the last test, I was excited to try Acheson's pot roast, mostly because he turned a quintessential meat-and-potatoes offering into something much more modern by serving the chuck roast with a charred onion, chickpea, and cilantro salad.

I still understand that I was adapting from a book for slow cookers, but something in step two officially set me free: "Place a large braising pan, such as a Dutch oven, over high heat and warm the canola oil until it shimmers."

This preparation for searing is a classic start to most braises, and for Acheson, who strikes me as a great chef and a practical guy, this was his proposal for the best way to get something seared, regardless of whether I was making his pot roast in the oven, the Instant Pot, or a slow cooker. I also got the feeling that the chuck roast—a big knob of a cut that is really awkward to move around in the pressure cooker's deep pot—would come out of a multicooker looking like a soccer ball, sad browned patches on a sphere of gray.

Right then, I let go of my multicooker searing hang-up and forevermore absolved the appliance of that duty.

I patted my chuck dry, seasoned it liberally, got out my Dutch oven, and set my stovetop burner to high. I've cooked meals like this a thousand times, but after multiple searing tests in underpowered multicookers, the combination of the extra room in my Dutch oven and the use of my most powerful burner made the searing feel like it was happening at warp speed. I also had a degree of control over things that's impossible in an electric pressure cooker. Being conservative, I'd guess that it was two to three times faster to sear it this way. The tradeoff for having to wash one extra pan felt like small potatoes.

So, friends, I let go. You should too. If you're wondering whether you ended up with the wrong electric pressure cooker, let that go too. Just sear on your stove. Do your best. Crack open a beer. Enjoy cooking. Dinner will be lovely.

Food writer Joe Ray (@joe_diner) is a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year, a restaurant critic, and author of Sea and Smoke with chef Blaine Wetzel.