Everything You Need to Make Hot Pot at Home

If you have an Instant Pot or a slow cooker, you may be curious about using it for hot pot. Though these appliances can work in a pinch, they can’t give you a great hot pot experience. Because a slow cooker can take a couple of hours to bring liquid to a boil, this Reddit thread suggests boiling your broth separately first, while also preheating your slow cooker’s insert with a pot of water to reduce thermal shock. That’s a lot of work, and once you’ve set everything up, there’s no guarantee that the slow cooker can continuously maintain safe cooking temperatures while you’re adding cold ingredients. An Instant Pot’s sauté function might hold a boil better, but that appliance is a little too tall to comfortably use at the table—you would probably need to stand up every time you add or remove food. On top of that, on some Instant Pot models, the sauté function shuts off automatically after 30 minutes, so you would need to restart it midmeal. With either appliance, you may find yourself trying to cook raw meat in broth whose temperature you can’t control well, and that’s not only un-tasty—it can also be unsafe.