Essential Accessories Every Instant Pot Owner Needs

An Instant Pot works fine straight out of the box, but a handful of inexpensive accessories make it dramatically more useful — and a couple of them aren’t optional so much as inevitable, because parts wear out with regular use. Here’s what actually earns a spot in the drawer versus what you can skip.

Extra Silicone Sealing Rings — Buy These First

This is the one accessory almost every long-time Instant Pot owner recommends before anything else. The stock sealing ring is silicone, and silicone absorbs odors over time, which means a ring used for curry one night can leave a faint curry smell in your cheesecake the next. A pack of Instant Pot Sealing Ring 2-Pack lets you keep one ring for savory cooking and one for sweet, and having a spare on hand also means you’re never stuck mid-recipe when a ring finally wears out or cracks.

A Steamer Basket

The Instant Pot’s inner pot is deep and round, which isn’t ideal for steaming vegetables, fish, or eggs directly — they end up sitting in liquid instead of above it. A Salbree Stainless Steel Steamer Basket fits inside the pot and lifts food above the water line, and it also doubles as a way to do pot-in-pot cooking, where a smaller dish of rice or eggs steams above a different ingredient cooking below.

A Trivet With Handles

Most Instant Pots ship with a basic trivet, but the handles on the stock version are often too short or too hot to grip safely once you’re pulling a scalding pot out of a pressurized cooker. A OXO Good Grips Trivet with Silicone Handles makes lifting hot dishes or a pot-in-pot setup out of the cooker noticeably less nerve-wracking.

A Tempered Glass Lid

The pressure-cooking lid is the one that gets all the attention, but it’s useless for sauté, slow cook, or simmer settings where you actually want to see and partially cover your food. A Instant Pot Tempered Glass Lid contains splatters during sauté mode and lets you keep an eye on a slow-cooked dish without lifting the lid and losing heat and moisture.

A Spare Stainless Steel Inner Pot

If you cook two things back-to-back — say, rice for dinner and then yogurt overnight — washing and drying the inner pot between uses gets old fast. A second Instant Pot Stainless Steel Inner Cooking Pot means you can start the next recipe immediately instead of waiting on dish duty, and it’s also a smart backup if your original pot ever gets scratched or warped.

Where to Stop

Big multi-piece accessory kits with 50 or more pieces are popular, but a lot of what’s bundled in — novelty egg molds, extra miniature trivets, cake pan sets you’ll use twice a year — isn’t essential for most people. Unless you’re already a frequent Instant Pot baker who wants a springform pan for cheesecakes, it’s reasonable to buy the five items above individually and skip the mega-kits.

Checking Compatibility Before You Buy

Instant Pot accessories aren’t always universal across models — a steamer basket, inner pot, or glass lid sized for a 6-quart unit won’t fit an 8-quart or 3-quart model. Always check the listed capacity on an accessory against your specific Instant Pot model before ordering, since a slightly-too-small or too-large fit is one of the most common return reasons for these add-ons.

Caring for the Accessories Themselves

Most of these accessories are dishwasher-safe, but sealing rings specifically benefit from an occasional deeper clean beyond a dishwasher cycle, since odors can linger in silicone even after washing. Letting a ring air out, unused, for a day or two between heavy sessions helps it release absorbed smells faster. Stainless steel inner pots and steamer baskets hold up well to regular dishwashing, but drying them fully before storing — the same rule that applies to other stainless cookware — prevents water spotting over time.

Knowing When to Replace Rather Than Clean

A sealing ring that’s visibly stretched out, cracked, or no longer sits flush in its groove should be replaced rather than cleaned — a compromised seal affects how well the Instant Pot builds and holds pressure, which can mean longer cook times or recipes that never quite finish properly. Most rings last a year or more under normal use, but frequent cooks running the machine several times a week may need to replace one closer to every six months. Keeping a spare on hand means you’re never stuck improvising when that happens mid-recipe.

The Bottom Line

Start with an extra sealing ring, because it’s the cheapest fix for the most common complaint (lingering smells), then add a steamer basket and trivet with handles since they expand what you can cook safely. A glass lid and spare inner pot are worth adding once you’re using the machine often enough that convenience starts to matter more than minimalism.