Well obviously you don’t use them for that. Just like you wouldn’t try make soup in a deep fryer, or sear a steak in a low temp oven.
The base concept of a pressure cooker is to shorten long cook times using the power of boiling water. Trying to use it to shave seconds off the minutes it takes to cook pasta is gonna lead to sadness. As is trying to mimic dry cooking methods.
The problem with the Instant Pot is that the company, and the buzz around the device, frequently tell you to. Including telling you to put different ingredients with different cook times in all at the start.
Just trying shit in a pressure cooker won’t work well, since you need some concept of the cook times. There’s a leaning curve, that involves finding quality time charts or recipes. I use a stove top pressure cooker, which hit higher pressures than electrics. And thus have shorter cook times. But since the Instant Pot is so popular most of what you find these days recipe or timing wise is Instant Pot specific (and low quality). Where as before the instant pot good recipes listed the pressure they were meant for, or timings for regular 15psi stove tops and low/electric pressures. So it’s actually more difficult to learn how to properly use a pressure cooker than it used to be.
1 Like
The biggest learning-curve issue I had with the Instant Pot is that recipes/hype tend to focus around “saving time” with it, but they never factor in the time it takes for the Pot to get up to pressure. Yeah, you can cook a stew-type-thing or rice in a few minutes less than stovetop, but it can take 10+ minutes to get to high pressure and actually start cooking.
The benefit of it isn’t saving time, it’s that it cooks without being watched/messed with, and can be set on a timer to prep your food when it’s needed.
1 Like
Depending on the pressure of the unit it’s well more than a few minutes. I regularly do dishes that would take 3+ hours in less than an hour. Running off a dish that usually takes 6 hours of braising in an hour is a significant time saving. Making quality stock in an hour and thirty instead of 12 hours of simmering, and getting better results is well worth it.
Time savings at low pressure are a bit less but you’re still talking about pushing all day dishes into after work territory. Provided you understand what you’re doing. Even with electronic units taking much longer to heat up an extra ten minutes on something that’s shortening cook times by hours isn’t a problem.
Instant Pot recipes often have that problem, and it isn’t just that they don’t list the heat up time (or prep, especially for multiple cooking steps). It’s that they don’t account for it or include it at all, probably in part because different models have different pressures and different heat up times. Or the people writing them don’t understand. Leading to dishes that are often over cooked. It’s just a big ole inconsistent mess.
That’s part and parcel of the “easy, quick, one pot” selling point. And especially because the idea is so reliant on the presets and additional settings that the whole eco system is designed to prevent you from understanding what’s going on. A lot of people, and a lot of the recipes, don’t seem to know there’s any pressure cooking involved.
I’d recommend looking for recipes (and older cook books) not specific to the Instant Pot. Look for actual pressures listed with the cook times, either as high/low or the actual PSI. Standard high/full pressure for stove tops is 15psi. Low and electric high tends to be 10-12 psi. Avoid the low settings on electrics they tend to be 8 psi or less, and are basically only good for compensating for elevation.
Ignore any and all presets and alternate modes. Apparently nothing but the rice cooker functions are anything but crappier versions of doing it the old fashioned way.
1 Like
Yes. With my real pressure cooker, I kmow from experience how long the wayer will take to boil, and I know when I put the lid on, it will be at pressure soon after.
I don’t have that feedback with my Instant Pot, though that’s partupially because I’ve not used it much. But I cooked brown rice yesterday, setting the time manually, and while there is a timing to show how long before the pressure drops at the end, there’s no indicator of how long before it comes up to pressure.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
