MyMini 4-Cup Multi-Cooker Electric Cookpot:  Review for Travelers

by Ryan Vagabundo

MyMini is a range of ultra-light, ultra-small electrical cooking appliances that first launched in 2019 and greatly expanded upon getting a dedicated shelf section in Walmart stores in 2022. Some people might not see the point of such tiny cookware at first, but there are some relevant use cases - school dorm rooms, offices, and for our purposes here, carrying electric cooking stuff to hotels and AirBnBs and such that do not furnish you with such niceties.

Today we'll be looking at the MyMini electric cookpot (formally titled the "4-Cup Multi-Cooker" on the packaging). At a price point of about $15 it's in line with slightly larger and much heavier cookpots & slow cookers, but we're considering it from the perspective of packing it out in a bag or luggage while looking to minimize space and weight.

CARRY SIZE AND WEIGHT

The MyMini cookpot is aces in this department, pretty much exactly what you would hope for in terms of balancing food volume and weight/size. It's listed at 1.25 lbs, but MUCH of that is the glass lid, which you can ditch (and probably will want to - more on that later). Even with the lid it's fairly trivial to find space for in a suitcase or large backpack and isn't a burden. 

In terms of amount of food you can cook in one run, it's perfect for one person. You can easily cook more than you need, even for a big appetite. You can probably prepare enough entree for two people in one run, though portions get a bit more limited. Any more than two (such as kids) and you're doing multiple runs, however.

COOKING HEAT AND CONTROL

The short version - the max heat level is great considering how small and cheap this is, but control is not exactly what you would call "fine-grained."

It's listed at 260 watts, but the manual does not specify a cook temperature that I can find. However, just from using it, it boils water quickly and will Maillard (brown) ground beef and turkey in contact with the bottom of the bowl and also cook most of the middle and the top through fairly quickly if covered properly (at most you just need to flip for a bit). I wouldn't try cooking something like steak or thick chicken but ground and thinly sliced raw meat is easily cooked to a safe temperature in this thing. You can also readily boil rice, pasta, oats, eggs and such. No power problems there, it doesn't have quite the oomph of a regular heavy cookpot but it's close enough to give you a very good range of options.

However, you really just get the one "cook" setting. The only switch settings are Off, Warm and Cook. And while the cook setting kicks out decent power, the "warm" setting is the opposite and does next to nothing. Slowly warming even a soup to an edible temperature takes absolutely forever. 

SAFETY

This is probably one of the biggest areas of concern considering the ultralight build and sub-$15 price point, but overall this thing seems pretty well-built. It does have some caution notes, however.

One is the glass lid. It's actually surprisingly thick and resilient, which makes it unfortunate that they seemingly went cheap on the set screw that holds the knob into place from the inside and didn't use stainless steel or something similarly resilient. It rusts in record time, for me within like three days of using the pot to make supper each night. Not great when water is beading up and dripping back down from there into the mixings! In the interest of not getting tetanus in my food, I opted to throw the lid out and simply cover the pot with a sheet of tin foil when needed (which does actually reduce the carry weight quite a bit). 

The other issue is that the interior pot is not removable. So you have to carefully clean the pot out while potentially splashing water around the power button and electrical cord inlet! These do seem to be sealed off fairly well (though the manual advises to "not submerge the unit in water"). I used it pretty heavily over three weeks and didn't encounter safety issues, though without being able to remove the pot cleaning is more of a hassle than it should be; I was careully pouring water out over top of the handles as that minimized it going over either the power switch or the cord entry. No problems with either over that time, so I assume it's designed safely enough if not flooded with water, but I would have liked to have seen a removable pot to improve this.

Speaking of the handles, they do not get hot to the touch despite looking a little concerning at first glance. At full blast the outer shell of the unit gets warm, but not hot enough to hurt you if you brush it. Little feet with rubber bottoms keep it from contacting or damaging surfaces as well as sliding accidentally. It's pretty well-designed overall and I didn't see anything obvious to make me worry about dangerous wear from carrying it or normal use. It also cools pretty quickly once shut off.

ACCESORIES AND WARRANTY

Obviously, for a $15 unit, you shouldn't expect much here. You do get a tiny little plastic "measuring cup," and a "rice spatula" that is actually pretty solid and well-suited for stirring stuff up and solid enough to pick up and flip meat and such. But beyond that it's bring your own anything else.

The product does have a warranty of one year from purchase date.

CLEANING

We've already discussed that the unit has to be rinsed directly without removing the interior pot, which is suboptimal but appears to be safe so long as you don't submerge it. 

The other factor here is the non-stick coating inside the pot, which is good and seems to be the pretty standard stuff on even lower-end pans and such these days. No issues with anything burning or sticking.

OVERALL RECOMMENDATION

My overall grade for this thing is "very doable." It has its issues, but is fit for purpose and surprisingly quality in certain ways.

While ideally you shouldn't have to replace the lid and introduce add-ons for it to do its job, you have to keep in mind that it's $15 and nobody else is really even in this niche cookware market (except maybe for questionable stuff from China on Temu and such that could end up starting a fire for all you know). I think the dealbreaker for me would have been had I realized you can't remove the interior bowl; I would have tried out the MyMini electric skillet instead. You might fish around to find a good stainless steel bowl or pot that fits to get around this (though get "surgical grade" for cooking, the dollar store stuff will leach who knows what); the compromise I was thinking of to avoid cleaning the pot too much would be to just cook meat wrapped in aluminum foil and maybe get some washable silicone cooking bags for heating up everything else. 

* If you're buying online direct from their website, code "THANKYOU25" gets 25% off, though you might still find better prices via Walmart or Amazon