Instant Pots

Cafe Society
21

I also recommend the bigger one. Mine doesn’t do sous vide. It wasn’t really a built-in option when i was shopping, it was something you could hack the wifi enabled models to do, and that seemed too complicated for me. Mine doesn’t do wifi, either, because it’s a pot, why does it need Wi-Fi? And it’s best feature is that it will happily keep your finished food warm and safe from the cats for hours after it’s done.

I use mine for yogurt. It makes great yogurt. Other than that, i haven’t used the slow cooking feature. I have used “saute” and “pressure” and “rice”.

I love it.

22

Made a delicious butter chicken in the InstaPot tonight. Such an easy recipe - just throw everything in and pressure cook 15 min, then sauté and throw in some heavy cream to thicken the sauce.

23

I haven’t tried the slow-cook mode yet. I mostly use mine for things like pot roast, converting whole chickens to soup, hard-boiled eggs, and rice (note: I do not recommend use of the “keep warm” feature for rice unless you enjoy scrubbing stuck gunk off the bottom of the pot).

I have a quite small kitchen, so uni-taskers such as a stand-alone slow cooker don’t tend to work out well for my (lack of) space. I much prefer the versatility of an Instant Pot. I do think there are other brands of similar devices, and plenty of third-party options on accessories, so the original company’s corporate woes can be worked around.

24

I find a good 12 hour soapy soak helps a lot. It like 95% wipes right off the next morning.

25

Youse guys have just about convinced me to get an instant pot and maybe unload a couple of stove-top pressure cookers (and a crock pot I use only to serve chili at parties).

26

Did you use Urvashi Pitre’s recipe? It’s easy, fast, and so good. My youngest asks for it every week.

Last night I made chicken soup in mine. I had made the stock a couple of days ago from the carcass of Sunday’s roasted chicken.1. The boys love my chicken soup. I can post that recipe, if anyone wants.

1 - Toss the carcass in, add a peeled onion, and toss in about a teaspoon of salt and three or four pepper corns. Cover it with 8 cups of water, and set to high pressure for an hour. Allow the pressure to release naturally for thirty minutes. Finally strain and cool. I keep it in a tupperware half-gallon juice container, which makes it easier to skim off the fat.

27

Me too. I have ordered one on Amazon today and added the veg basket as an extra. I won’t use it for rice as I have an excellent rice cooker already.

Tomorrow, I am cooking a half shoulder of lamb with carrots and onions in my existing slow cooker. This takes at least six hours and is one of our favourites. I am looking forward to trying it in the new instant pot when it arrives.

28

Me too. I bought one because our existing slow cooker got broken in a house move, and at the time, there was a market rush on people buying slow cookers - couldn’t get one anywhere, so I bought a pressure cooker that also does sous vide, yoghurt making and slow cooking. It’s not actually that great at slow cooking. I haven’t tried yoghurt or sous vide, but I use it a lot for pressure cooking, which is something I never had the facility to do before.

In the end, we bought another slow cooker that is just a slow cooker (but I still use the pressure cooker as a pressure cooker)

29

We use ours to make yogurt. It makes great yogurt, much better than the stuff we used to make in the oven. (back when we had an oven with a plot light.) I did have to shop around for good vessels to hold the milk, especially during the “scald” stage. I eventually found something that safely held a quart of milk (without dirtying the instant pot’s pot) and also fit inside when it was sealed.

Reviews I’ve read say that it’s mediocre as a slow cooker because it seals too tightly and there’s not enough evaporation, and the temperature control of the sous vide function isn’t as tight as with a decent sous vide wand. But mine doesn’t need to be sealed on “slow cook” settings, so that confuses me. I could just rest a plate on top if i wanted to simulate the lid of a slow cooker.

30

That’s my experience too. I have the duo crisp IP. Sweet potato fries turned out well with fry lid. Also used it to crisp up pork spare ribs after cooking. But basket layering of items to fry stuff is awkward when trying to flip or move the product around. There is a trivet of sorts that it comes with to put the fry lid on when hot.

But my real quibble is it’s so big it can’t stay out on a counter. And I have to stand on a stool to see inside the pot when it’s on my countertop. I’m 5’7” and standing on a stool to stir the IP. Maybe my counters are taller than average?

31

I bought an Instantpot and am still trying to figure out a good starter recipe to help me become comfortable using it - the darn thing didn’t come with a recipe book, and when I look on line I tend to find really stupid stuff like cooking a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, or more complex recipes that assume you already know what you’re doing, that say “set the flooze button to snergle then after 20 minutes release the blork” – but don’t accompany that with definitions.

If anyone can point me to “first time user, well-spelled-out instruction” recipes for actual dishes (a roast or a bean stew or something like that - or at least, start with raw veggies and cook them, not just heat up a bag of frozen stuff) I would be grateful.

I know there are different types out there … what I have is a standard Instantpot brand cooker.

32

I’m terrible at recipes – I just throw in everything by feel, but here’s one for chicken broth/stock, which is my #1 use for the cooker:

33
34

I was looking for basic instructions and pro tips for using the IP I’ve subscribed to this YT channel. It’s all IP recipes and instructions and she has a playlist of IP 101 getting started.

35

thanks guys … I knew you’d come through!

ETA: it is early Saturday morning here and I have a well-stocked kitchen. My goal for the day is now to find something in the above links and make it. Will report back later!

36

In reviews I have seen they say the sous vide function on the InstaPot does not work well at all.

Overall, they like the machine a lot but that was one feature they did not care for (which is fine because that’s not really why you want one anyway).

37

That’s my guess. I’m 5’6", and have no trouble looking at the bottom of my instant pot as i saute meat or deglaze the pan.

Speaking of which

I can’t find my favorite recipe, but i can probably relay it well enough. I not that it took me a while to be comfortable enough with the interface to reliably find settings… But

Short ribs:

Season the short ribs with salt and pepper.

Set pot to saute. When it gets hot, put down the ribs in one layer. Set a timer and leave them alone for 7 minutes. While they cook, peel and dice the vegetables. I use carrots, garlic, onion, and shallot. The shallot matters a lot.

Flip the meat, and cook for 5 more minutes.

(If there’s more meat than fits in a single layer, repeat with the rest of the meat, while the first batch sits on a plate.)

Remove the meat to a plate.

If there’s more than a tablespoon or so of fat in the pot, pour out the excess.

Add the diced veggies and saute until soft. (“Sweat” them.)

Then add a cup or two of red wine (one cup of the meat cooked in one layer, two if i browned two batches) and scrape the bottom of the pan to pick up all those yummy browned bits.

Put the meat back in, toss a sprig of parsley on top (recipe calls for rosemary, too, but I’m not fond of rosemary), seal, and cook on high pressure for 50 minutes. (I always use the “keep warm” setting.)

Let the pot cool for 15 minutes (on “keep warm”) then release the pressure manually, and remove the meat to a serving container. Skim any obvious excess fat. Add a shot of balsamic vinegar, and turn the pot back to “saute” (or remove it from the unit and put it on the stove) and cook it down until the sauce is a little thicker and glossy. Pour the sauce over the meat, and serve. I like to serve it with quinoa.

38

In general, all you need to know is how much liquid and how long to cook. I make beans by googling, checking the ratio of water to bean and the cook time in a couple of recipes, and then make the beans, seasoning however i would in any cooking method.

So, split pea soup is 1 pound of split peas, 6 cups broth (or water), plus whatever other veggies and seasoning you like, cook 15 minutes on high pressure, leave it on “keep warm” until dinner time, but at least long enough for the pressure to drop.

The amount of water from other pressure cooker recipes will work. The times are a little shorter for stove top pressure cookers, which get hotter.

39

The conversion I read, and may have mentioned here or in another thread, is an additional two minutes for every ten minutes of a conventional stovetop pressure cooker recipe. So add 20% in time.

40

The Butter Chicken recipe by Urvasi Pitre mentioned in post #26 is famous. There are recipes for it all over the web.