Kyle's Instant Pot Adventures

[mimekiller]

[Tahlvin]

[Mike]

Yay! Another convert!

Soon you ALL will be assimilated.

[SumDumTrim]

[mimekiller]

Its a social media ham date.

[Phoebe]

Bought one, waiting for it to arrive. Or one of the "porch pirates" already nabbed it. Looking forward to the experiment.

[Tahlvin]

We happen to have a ham sitting in the fridge at this moment, and are planning to cook it up in the Instant Pot sometime soon.

[Phoebe]

Frustrated because I ordered an instant pot but it has not arrived for a long time now. Also, where my exercise leggings? It's finally cold and I'm in shorts, leggings store. Otherwise I would not have bothered. Anyway, any other words of wisdom about the pot, like what types of foods or recipes tend to work better than others?

[SumDumTrim]

Best I have ever tasted.


One pot meals don't get any better.

One very versatile ones is a couple to three or four chicken breasts, a can of rotel, and a packet of taco seasoning. Cook on chicken setting. You can make tacos, serve it over rice, nachos, anything you can think of.

[Phoebe]

So exciting! I got an instant pot for Christmas and am going to start experimenting soon! One has to visit a grocery store first and motivation is very low to leave the house.

[Phoebe]

Things have been so busy that this is the first day I actually got to try my instant pot. Which I got for Christmas. I made cochinita pibil, except without a whole cochinita and with an instant pot instead of pibil. One cup of orange juice, 3/4 cup lime juice and 1/4 cup water, about half a container of salsa, about a TB each of cumin and the ground pepper, forget the name - it's red powder made from the pepper. 3 lbs salted chunks of pork roast. Paprika, black pepper, chopped onion, pinch clove. So good. The meat is plump and moist, completely infused with the good flavor, and falls apart into pulp that we put into tacos and on top of rice for the kids, very good with black beans and avocado and more salsa. I just eat it out of a bowl with the beans and toppings because I don't want that other bad carb stuff. Definitely will make this again. Going to try the butter chicken this week.

I'm eating more meatless stuff, so if anybody has mainly vegan recipes or things you can make in the instant pot and then sprinkle a little cheese on, let me know. I really want a good source for lentil stew or anything made with weird and different grains that I don't normally get to eat. The instant pot insert sheet advertises all these beans it claims to be able to cook in just a few minutes, but the recipes are often written by Paleo or Keto diet people whose recipes I immediately fail to trust due to... well, lots of ways these are breaking down. A lot of glassy-eyed true believers, some of whom also might be good Cooks, but there's no way to tell because they enjoy some things plainly inedible by people who like pleasure.

[Phoebe]

So the book with recipes for the instant pot seems almost totally worthless with maybe two exceptions. It also leaves me with a question: is there a reason you're not supposed to put salt in when you're pressure cooking soaked dry beans, or is it just that these Pure Food nutters are sure you don't need added salt? This is why I like it when a cook explains why they are doing the things they choose to do.

If anybody knows a particular website or source where you reliably get good instant pot recipes, please advise. I'm most interested in vegetable focused things, but at this point anything would be good. If I need to use two other pans and processes in order to make the recipe work, then f*** having the instant pot in the first place, so ideally it would be people who are using an instant pot because of convenience and not just because it provides a nice little hour-long steam break in the middle of their 5-hour recipe process.

[Eliahad]

Salt added too early to beans can create tough, rough textured skins. So if you're cooking on a stove top, you soak the beans over night, and then salt when you're boiling them. I don't know how this translates to the insta-pot, but I imagine that's why you don't salt them when you start with dry beans.

[Kyle]

[Phoebe]

I will make this but with the Ginger added back. I trust you on the celery. Family would rebel. I love celery. My problem with the internet instant pot recipes is that there are too many of them, so as I wander through this vast terrain I find either cooks who don't understand the appeal of the "instant" word and think I want to do a whole load of dishes every time I cook, or I am highly suspicious of the types of things they're putting in the pot because they think things like "grated nuts are a good substitute for parmesan". But people here (exception: El Jefe) I would trust to have some kind of decent taste, so if you liked it, I'm making it.

[Kyle]

My problem with celery in the Instant Pot is that the pressure tends to be too much for celery, which has a delicate enough consistency without being subjected to intense pressure cooking. The flavor is fine, but unnecessary here, and I didn't see the need for the extra prep.

When looking on google, you have to be careful. One of the "tells" of an amateur that doesn't know what they're doing is to look at the spicing. If they don't tell you to add salt and pepper, they usually don't know what they're doing. If they tell you to add curry powder or curry paste, they usually don't know what they're doing. If they tell you to add 18 spices including things you've never heard of, they usually don't know what they're doing. But when you try a recipe from a blog and it turns out great, then I recommend going back to that blog and trying their other stuff.

EDIT: This is also important: be super cautious about anything that has cheese or dairy substitutes but "you'll swear you can't tell the difference!" You can, and sometimes it's really awful- like the time I tried dairy-free/gluten-free linguine with Alfredo sauce. Inedible. Anything that tells you to use "umami flakes" or other stuff like that, instead of real food and spices, should probably be avoided.

[Kyle]

[akiva]

We got an instant pot a few days ago. First time we used it to make risotto; it was quite good.

[El Jefe]

[Phoebe]

There are so many reasons, so many! But I will say this: there are few people with whom it is better to share a distaste for something! Especially if it's a bad TV show or sexist rpg types.