Learning to use an Instant Pot cooker

Learning to use an Instant Pot Cooker

This is something I have wanted since the first day I saw one sitting on our daughter's kitchen counter.  Were they called Instapot when they first came out?  Or is that a different brand?  The one I received for Christmas is an Instant Pot.

I spent several days looking at a lot of recipes on the Instant Pot website.

I picked one that I liked and fixed it last night.

Everything went well except for the recipe.  There was an optional ingredient that when made with the option it might have been fine though I didn't use it and the recipe came out way too salty.

I feel that the next thing I make I am going to use my own recipe and learn to adjust the time.

Has anyone found a calculator or something that helps adjust the time from an oven to the Instant Pot?

We are having burgers today so in a few days maybe I will make a peach cobbler or maybe a steamed pudding.

Don't get stuck on just insta pot recipes, look at pressure cooker recipes.

Anne Miller wrote:

Has anyone found a calculator or something that helps adjust the time from an oven to the Instant .

I've used one for over 4 years now and love it. So there are a lot of tricks. I mostly use it for rice, stews, chili's, shredded meats, oatmeal, steamed veggies and broth to name a few. Haven't played too much in deserts.

I usually research instant pot times on some recipes and just play with it. White rice is 3 min with natural release. Regular chicken for shredding is 10 min natural release.  I've cooked whole rotisserie chicken and I believe its 35 min with natural release. Most chili's and stews I cook up the meat and set for 10 mins.

Send me a pm if you wanna chat more. I love the IP!

Thank you, Robert and Jennie!

I have two recipe books that came with my pressure cookers so I'll check them out for recipes.

Those cooking times are handy thanks!

This thing looks like a pressure pot.
A pressure pot works in half the time the unpressured pot with its lid. Just start counting once the steam is going out.

My family has been using one for a few months now, and I don't think anyone has used an actual recipe yet.

We follow the rule of pressure canning, and choose the time based on the ingredient that needs the longest. From there, just toss everything in and press start.

That might not work so well with pasta or white rice, but Mom's doing keto so we aren't eating those very much. Most of our meals are meat, vegetables, and sometimes potatoes, with whatever seasonings the cook feels like using that day.

It seems to work.

I've been using the InstaPot to cook steel cut oats: I mix 1.5 cup oats and 1.5 cups red split lentils, and cook on high for 4 minutes with 6 cups of water. They have the same cook time and work well together, high fiber and good protein. I then toss in some mixed berries and ground flax for my normal breakfast and get several servings that way. Also works well for cooking rice. There's a cooking time chart that comes with it, next up will be cooking chickpeas to make some homemade hummus.

I've decided it's time I joined the ranks of the Instant Pot owners. I've sent off for one and am eagerly awaiting its arrival.

Many years ago I had a pressure cooker, the sort you set on the gas and have to race out and switch the gas off at the right time. I don't think I could operate like that any more... I love my slow cookers for making bone broth and chutney and soup and for rendering fat. I love the haybox for cooking rice, beans and pork tongue. But they haybox doesn't do everything, and I've had my slow cookers for so long that the crocks have begun to crack one by one and I'm reduced to one enormous one that I can hardly lift to make bone broth in, and one very small one that makes just enough soup for two and I have to run for almost two days straight to work through a batch of meat scraps to get everything rendered out and cooked.

When I started to look at replacement slow cookers, most of them these days seem to have non-stick insert, which I'm not really interested in. I did find one with a stainless insert but it was a super expensive model with lots of high-tech electronics which I found a bit of a turn off. But then I looked at the Instant Pots, which have rather nice stainless steel inserts. They are also rather pricey and high-tech, but also incredibly versatile as they can be set to sauté, slow cook, pressure cook or even make yogurt. I kept going to look at them and wondering if I should splash out before another crock breaks and then the one I'd been eyeing up came up on a time-restricted special offer and I couldn't resist any more.

Whilst waiting for it to arrive, I've been reading up about them and watching videos.

This one has been rather eye-opening 6 Things Nobody Tells You About Slow Cooking in an Instant Pot (sorry, it's been set so that it won't embed for some reason but I did manage to embed the shortened version below). It points out that it's best to use the sauté function to get the contents up to temperature before setting the pot to slow cook. Also it recommends that you use a glass lid with a vent hole rather than the pressure cooker lid.



I've almost run out of chutney and still have some of last years figs that need using up before the new crop is ready so I'm hoping to make a test-batch in the instant pot as one of my first experiments when it arrives.

I use my Instant Pot for a slow cooker mostly.

Only used it 2 or 3 times as an Instant Pot, mostly beans.

Burra, hearing you are going for it makes me feel a bit better.  I also am on my last crockpot, they stopped making them here and it's not exactly something I can have sent over on the cheap from the US... I know the day is coming when I'm going to drop it or it's going to finally stop working. I use it a lot, and I know I'll miss it, and have been wondering what I'm going to do when it goes, this gives me a bit of hope.
I look forward to hearing how it works out for you (and if you don't mind, which model you bought).

I make yogurt once a week with mine. Pork for pulled pork BBQ, and any kind of bean seem to be what I use it for.

Tereza Okava wrote:I look forward to hearing how it works out for you (and if you don't mind, which model you bought).

This is the one I bought - Instant Pot Duo 3 litre. It's described as 3 litres but I suspect it's actually actually 3 quarts, so a bit bigger than described.

Many, many years ago when the UK was introducing metric measurements I memorised three little ditties from the back of a weetabix box, including - a litre of water's a pint and three quarters.

Just for interest, the other two were a metre measures three foot three, it's longer than a yard you see and two and a quarter pounds of jam weigh about a kilogram.




It seems that I will have to find an alternative, basic sort of lid if I want to slow-cook with it.



Seeing as my Instant Pot hasn't arrived yet, I tried to find out the size I would need by asking AI.

what size lid to use for the instant pot duo 3 quart?

and it helpfully told me...

The Instant Pot® 3QT Tempered Glass Lid fits the 3-quart Instant Pot Duo.

Which was singularly unhelpful.

A bit more googling around revealed that it might be 7.6 inches, which to me is a painful mixture of archaic and decimal style measurements. Anyway, that translated to around 19.3 cm so I went and had a rummage in my stash of old lids and found two vented glass lids that might or might not work. One missing a handle and one that for some reason which totally escapes my memory has a handle that looks like it's melted in a hot oven. I cleaned up the most likely candidate but won't fit a spare handle unless it turns out to actually fit. It has a lip which might or might not fit inside the inner pot, which also has a lip that might confuse the issue. I have a goodly supply of spare lids lurking around the place though so I'm sure I'll have something that can be pressed into service.

I am not sure if that is the smaller pot that I bought though I banished the 6 qt for the smaller 3 qt or 4 qt.  It is a Mini Instant Pot.

I still only have used it as an slow cooker.  

What I like about it is that the inner pot is not heavy like the 6 qt.

I haven't cooked beans yet though I did rice but it took twice as long to cook.

I will hold two leg quarter with potatoes, onion and a carrot.

Ooooh look what I found - a totally must-have accessory so that if you use the quick pressure release you can direct the jet of steam to the side instead of straight up into your cupboards.



And I found a 3D printable version for the instant pot duo which I might have to try. I might have to call her Cawldeira...

Burra Maluca wrote:Many, many years ago when the UK was introducing metric measurements I memorised three little ditties from the back of a weetabix box, including - a litre of water's a pint and three quarters.

Just for interest, the other two were a metre measures three foot three, it's longer than a yard you see and two and a quarter pounds of jam weigh about a kilogram.

This is fabulous, Burra. Once I started living in metric lands I lost my non-metric abilities. At this point I would be hard pressed to state with certainty what exactly quarts and pints are... Thankfully my thumb joint measures exactly an inch, so I can still handle that.

It's arrived!

My awesome neighbours collected it for me from the post office, which is just a bit too far for me to be able to walk to these days, as both the boys seem to be working non-stop at the moment and rather long hours which means they never pass the post office when it's open.

I put it to the test as soon as I'd finished playing with it by putting in a small bag of bones I'd been collecting, mostly chicken leg bones. It IS a 3 litre pot, not a 3 quart one. And the maximum fill line is at 2 litres, which will be fine for just the two of us but I'm going to have to get handy with the bone saw if we get free bones to make broth with and it includes ones that are too big.

It was pretty straightforward to set up, and much less scary than the pressure cookers I occasionally used when I were a lass. It took a little while to get to temperature, but then it was filled to the max level with frozen bones, half a frozen lemon and cold water so it's hardly surprising. I gave it two hours under pressure - I used medium pressure but suspect high would have been better. It bleeped at me to tell me when it was up to pressure, then it bleeped ten times to tell me when the time was up, then it switched to 'keep warm' until I told it to stop. Then I waited for the pressure to release as I don't see that there's any rush to use the quick release - more time will just mean more flavour and more nutrients.

Apparently you can switch the beeps off, which would be useful if you are very sensitive to sound, or have a baby in the house, or want to set it to cook at night.

When the pressure was released I dug out my supply of glass lids so I don't have to use the pressure-lid when I want to slow-cook or sauté. The first one I tried had a lip so it would sit nicely and securely inside the rim of the pot, only it was a touch too big and the lip sat on top of the rim instead of sliding neatly down into it. But the next one fitted perfectly. It took me a while to remove the original handle which had melted onto it, but it came off eventually and I removed a nice shiny handle from another surplus lid and now have a dedicated slow-cooker and wait-for-it-to-cool-down lid for the instant pot.

It does use more power at a time than the slow cooker at 700 watts rather than 100 or 200 (depending on the setting) but you can hear it clicking on and off so that isn't continuous. I guess if you were running it off solar power it might make things tricky if you only had a small system. I'm also not certain what would happen if there was a power glitch. We sometimes have the power off for just half a second, which is probably enough to knock any active programs out of the system. I think  700 watt appliance is a bit big to keep attached to the uninterruptible power supply. I'll test it next time, with something a bit forgiving. Maybe more bone broth if I rummage and find more bones. ~

So far I'm impressed!

I think we're going to become very good friends...

I first got an InstantPot about five years ago, and used it quite a bit, but was frustrated with the pressure cooking feature - my pot wouldn't seal about half of the time (when I went back and looked at the reviews on Amazon, that appeared to be a common issue with that pot). It was a six-quart pot, and, wanting something a little bigger so I could do things like fry hamburgers more easily, I replaced it about two or three years ago with an 8-quart Ninja brand. I have had zero problems with this unit - it has functioned perfectly. I do almost all of my cooking in it (we don't have a working kitchen range - I have a propane range, but we've never hooked it up. Maybe one of these years....) I fry/saute, pressure cook, and roast most often. The air fryer feature and yogurt making feature get used once in a while (these pots make the best home-made yogurt I've ever managed to make, aside from a dedicated yogurt-maker). And if we could still eat eggs - daughter is extremely sensitive to them - boiled eggs made in the pressure cooker are the easiest to peel, even if they are fresh from the hens (or ducks). I think these electric cookers are probably the best small kitchen appliance you can have, and if I only had room for one thing, this would be it.

If you are looking at the InstantPot brand, do check the reviews carefully and make sure you aren't getting one with sealing problem. They might have fixed that since I bought mine, but it will pay to be a little cautious.

Anne Miller wrote:This is something I have wanted since the first day I saw one sitting on our daughter's kitchen counter.  Were they called Instapot when they first came out?  Or is that a different brand?  The one I received for Christmas is an Instant Pot.

I think it has always been instant pot and there was never an instapot. I am not sure if it was due to lack of desire to annunciate or some people like to shorten it to that one word.

We make it a point to say the actual two word name of that particular kitchen appliance in our household due to my neuroses with acronyms, slang, etc.

Today's experiment was spaghetti.

I've only ever cooked spaghetti by boiling it in a big pan of salted water and draining it. But with the instant pot you can cook it in just the right amount of liquid, and you can saute onions and stuff first so you end up with pretty much a complete meal at the end.

This video was helpful...



I sautéd onions and mushrooms to start off with, because I wanted to test the sauté function. I used the medium setting and it worked brilliantly.

Then I added 250 ml of the chicken broth I'd made yesterday, because that is the minimum amount that is safe to use in the 3 litre instant pot on pressure mode. Then 75 grams of spaghetti, snapped in half so I could get it in the pan. It felt so odd to do that after years of only ever adding it to boiling water and shoving it down gradually as it softened, but I decided to trust the recipe and just get on with it. I set it to pressure cook for two minutes then let the pressure release naturally for five minutes, releasing the valve to finish the job off at that time. The pasta was just about cooked and there was a bit of starchy water left around the pasta. Being a tightwad, I didn't add meat or cheese to the dish, but I did stir in a scoop of protein powder because I have a big stash of the stuff to use up and it seemed like a good opportunity. I didn't add any greens because I didn't have any prepared, but in future at this point I will stir some in and sauté for a minute to cook the greens, drive off any surplus moisture and get the pasta slightly less al dente. I served it with black pepper and oregano leaves. Plain, simple and to me quite delicious. Though the protein powder made the 'sauce' a bit grainy. The spaghetti itself was delicious cooked like that, and only one pot to clean up at the end.

It would be *very* easy to dress it up much more with a proper sauce, but this was wonderfully simple and a good test.

No photo because I used a flash and it came out looking worrying like dog vomit, or rampaging slime mould, despite it tasting great.

After lunch I dug out a bag of figs that had been lurking in the freezer and I'm messing about finding the right settings for making chutney. The low sauté setting seems about the best - the slow cook didn't seem high enough even after attempting to get it up to temperature first.

Burra, I know you eat a lot of lentils, not sure if you eat brown ones or the pink ones, but the brown ones are very well suited to cooking together with pasta in that same scheme of using the pasta to soak up all the tasty cooking water, especially if other things are involved (veggies, scraps of meat, bones, etc). Maybe a good experiment. I have a recipe but I need to think about where it might be located (it is the kind of thing that will probably have to come to me in a dream, so it might take a while).

Tereza Okava wrote:Burra, I know you eat a lot of lentils, not sure if you eat brown ones or the pink ones,

I had to google pink lentils. Seems they are the same as what I call red split lentils which is what I usually use as my other half prefers them.

the brown ones are very well suited to cooking together with pasta in that same scheme of using the pasta to soak up all the tasty cooking water, especially if other things are involved (veggies, scraps of meat, bones, etc). Maybe a good experiment. I have a recipe but I need to think about where it might be located

My meals tend to be throw-togethers so I don't use up too many spoons on them. My other half usually cooks the meals when he's home but lately he's been working every day and I've been playing with my new toy the instant pot to see what it can do. I might cook up a batch of spaghetti sauce with lentils and scraps and a load of tomato and freeze them into suitable sized blocks so I can throw them in with pasta for a very quick meal for myself.  Himself will prefer to cook from scratch though and mess about making fancy sauce just before serving.

I've made two batches of chutney now and am quite falling in love with my little Cawldeira, as I've named her. I recently lost my 3 litre slow cooker that I had for 17 years (crock cracked) that used to run a bit hot and was absolutely perfect for cooking chutney as I could bring it up to temperature then run it with a mesh cover and it would keep simmering away and driving off moisture until it had reduced enough to get a perfect consistency. It turns out that the low sauté setting on the the instant pot is absolutely perfect for reducing chutney! The only downside is that the maximum time you can set for sautéing is 30 minutes so it took a couple of goes to get the chutney up to temperature, covered with a glass lid, then several more goes to get it reduced down the right consistency. No great problem, but something to be aware of, and it's good to check the chutney every half hour anyway to give it a stir and see what stage it has reached.

I also tried just using the bones from half a small rotisserie chicken that my son decided to give me to experiment with having watched the video in the thread about Michelin quality chicken stock in 60 minutes.  He gave me full permission to experiment as I thought fit, and I'm afraid I simply could NOT bring myself to use the meat off the chicken just to make broth with and then throw the meat away. It goes against everything I believe in. So my other half and I ate the meat and I made broth out of just the bones using a litre of water. It came out a bit thin to be honest, which isn't surprising with the few bones we had (it was a small chicken...) but it did make a very nice broth to have with bread for yesterday's lunch.

Today my other half presented me with a small, raw chicken and I took the breast off for today's lunch, the legs off for another meal and put them in the freezer, and I've just made a batch of broth with the carcass, including bits of meat. I suspect it will be much better, but it's still cooling down so I haven't tested it yet.

The other experiment I tried was rice pudding. I'm afraid for this one the instant pot has scored lower than the hay-box. I have a lovely little enamel pan which I boil up the rice for a minute before putting it in the haybox. Then I cool it down and place the whole pan in the fridge so it doubles to cook and store and serve it from. I usually have rice pudding with fruit either for breakfast or supper so there's nearly always a pan with some in. If I make it in the instant pot it's easier at the start because I don't have to watch the pan and stir it and make sure it doesn't boil over, but at the end I have to transfer it into something else before putting it in the fridge. Which means extra washing up and faffing about.

One thing I have noticed though is that the outside of the instant pot does NOT get as hot as the outside of any of the slow cookers I've had. Which says to me that more of the electricity used goes to heating the actual food, not the house. So for something like stock, which is much quicker in the instant pot, far less heat is getting wasted. Which during the summer here in Portugal is something I consider to be a Very Good Thing.

I also rather like the little beeps she makes. When I put the lid on, she sings in delight. She beeps to say something like 'here we go!' when she starts cooking, and to tell me when she's up to temperature, and delightedly tells me when the time is up to say something like 'I have cooked all this food just for you mum!' before politely shutting up and not nagging me again. There is a setting that switches the beeps off completely apparently but in this case, and speaking as someone rather sensitive to sounds and beeps, I think her beeps are friendly and informative.

So far, I'm absolutely loving having here here and I can see her replacing my remaining slow cookers as well as becoming my go-to for cooking just about anything.

I suspect my son is going to get himself one and I can imagine any college student finding them almost indispensable.

I have a few more things I want to test-cook in them yet. And I want to see how resilient they are to power glitches. But not today...