The Best Kitchen Appliances Our Editors Actually Cook With
These are the appliances that earn permanent counter space — from the pressure cooker that changed weeknight dinners to the ice cream maker that became a weekend ritual.
The best kitchen appliance isn’t the most expensive or the most featured. It’s the one you actually use. These are the only appliances in our test kitchen that survived a ruthless elimination round: everything that earned its shelf space by being genuinely life-changing to use.
Best Pressure Cooker: Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1
The Instant Pot remains the most transformative kitchen appliance of the last decade. A pot roast that takes 3 hours in the oven takes 60 minutes here. Dried beans go from hard to perfectly cooked in 40 minutes with no soaking. Chicken breasts are done in 10 minutes — and they’re actually juicy.
The 7-in-1 label is real: we use this as our slow cooker, yogurt maker, and rice cooker regularly, not just as a pressure cooker. The 6-quart size is right for families of 4. The stainless steel inner pot is dishwasher safe and doesn’t retain odors.
Best for: Anyone who cooks proteins, legumes, or grains from scratch and wants to cut cooking time dramatically. Not for people who want to “set and forget” longer cooks — the slow cooker function is there, but the lid doesn’t seal as loosely as a traditional slow cooker.
Best Treat Appliance: Ninja CREAMi
The CREAMi is the most joyful kitchen appliance we’ve brought home this year. The concept is simple: freeze your liquid base overnight in the included pint, load it into the machine, press a button, and 90 seconds later you have perfectly textured ice cream. The machine processes the frozen solid from the outside in, shaving it into a smooth, scoopable consistency.
What makes it genuinely special: the customization. Protein shake leftovers become protein ice cream. Mango and coconut water become a restaurant-quality sorbet. Leftover oatmeal becomes a surprisingly good warm-weather snack. The Re-spin function runs the pint through a second cycle when the texture isn’t quite right.
Our Kitchen Testing Process
Every appliance in this guide was used in our editors’ home kitchens for at least 30 days. We evaluate ease of setup, quality of results, ease of cleaning, and the likelihood that we’d continue using it after the review period ends. The Instant Pot and Ninja CREAMi both passed that last test easily.