Top 10 Instant Pot Tips
One of our favorite kitchen gadgets is the Instant Pot. This is basically a pressure cooker on steroids. It can make all kinds of one pot meals. This is our Instant Pot guide with our Top 10 Instant Pot Tips.
The Instant Pot has a lot of buttons and can seem overwhelming. It can function as a slow cooker, steamer, rice cooker, yogurt maker and sauté pot. However, we use it mainly as an electric pressure cooker and steamer.
We know many people who grew up in the middle 20th century are scared of pressure cookers. Today’s pressure cookers are very safe. Of course, you should never remove the lid while it is under pressure. The Instant Pot provides a tight seal and will lock when pressure has built.
Make sure and check out our Top 10 Instant Pot Recipes.
The beauty of the Instant Pot as a pressure cooker is that it can cook roast and stews in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Of course, it can also function as a slow cooker, but we rarely use it as such.
The instant pot website has a great guide to cooking time. This also tells you how much water to add. Almost everything you pressure cook will be less than an hour, often only a few minutes. This is even true of frozen foods.
One function we do use is the Sauté feature. This allows us to brown the meat and vegetables before pressure cooking. It means we don’t have an extra pan to clean out.
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Top 10 Instant Pot Tips
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Use Liquid
Water or some liquid is required for pressure cooking. Generally, at least 1 cup of liquid is the minimum to build pressure
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Account for Time to Build Pressure
The pressure cooker can take 15 minutes or more to build to pressure so make sure you account for that (if a recipe says cook on high pressure for 15 minutes count on a total of 30 minutes). Note some recipes have you set the cooking time to 1 minute or even zero. That is not a type. It means the food is done as soon as pressure is fully built.
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Keep it Clean
Make sure seal and valve is kept clean. A dirty seal can stop the Instant Pot from reaching pressure. We faithfully clean the sealing ring but also keep extra rings on hand. They are easy to replace and the most important part of making sure the Instant Pot functions properly. You can see a guide to cleaning an Instant Pot here. You may want to purchase additional sealing rings.
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Open Carefully
Don’t try and open the pressure cooker while the red button is up. The Instant Pot forms a tight seal so you would really have to pull to take the lid off. Wait until the red button drops down and the lid will easily remove.
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Natural Release than Quick Release
Natural release takes a long time. When a recipe calls for natural release we usually wait 20 minutes and then manually release the remaining steam (aka quick release).
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Carefully Quick Release
For quick release use a wooden spoon or other long device to manually release steam so you don’t get burned.
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Steaming
The steaming feature is basically cooking at high pressure with water added to the bottom of the pot. It is a way to automatically set the Instant Pot for pressure cooking for 10 minutes.
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Steam Food Above Water
The Instant Pot comes with a wire trivet rack. This is designed to raise food above the water for steaming.
The wire rack raises food for steaming. We use it for tamales. -
Use Saute Feature
Save time on cooking and cleaning by using the Sauté feature to brown meat or sauté vegetables before pressure cooking
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Properly Adjust Pressure Valve
Make sure the pressure valve is in the seal position before starting pressure cooker. The valve is loose and easy to turn. However, this means it can easily get in the wrong position.
Which Instant Pot to Buy
There are quite a few variations on the Instant Pot. Our recommendation is to keep it simple and buy the basic 6-quart version. This is what we own and we do not use all the features. More expensive versions have additional functions, but we like to keep it basic. Our version was $100 but we can usually find it for about $70.
Make sure and check out our Top 10 Instant Pot Recipes.
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