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.