While the instant pot isn’t available in Australia, a multi-cooker with similar functionality is. I’m in the early stages of researching to decide whether it would be worth buying for my little family. We do a lot of batch cooking, and cooking from scratch generally. Our oven is a pain to use, and we like hands-off cooking, so we use our slow cooker (crock pot) a lot. Batch cooking helps us to save money on groceries and avoid spending too much $ on takeaway.
I’m keen to hear what you, personally, cook in your instant pot, because I find that more useful and relatable than just browsing recipe sites. Please share your wisdom and experience with me
We don’t use it at all! Because we cheaped out and got an unrecognised brand name and it is an absolute piece of garbage that beeps like made and claims random errors. But we got a deal?
Oh and added bonus - the precious pups HATE the beeping, steam spewing scary monster in the kitchen. And bless them, bark at it until it is defeated and we are all safe.
When it did briefly work, I made a delicious pasta and chicken dish which seemed unnatural to me - adding uncooked pasta and raw chicken in together with a sauce. Oh and delicious risotto.
Edit to add: when you call the help line in the manual you get a random office in Melbourne and a somewhat bemused lady who said she takes multiple calls a day relating to the now bust appliance company and the number had been reallocated.
I make black beans In mine once a week for tacos (45 mins to done from dry with no soaking), I just steamed a bunch of veggies (4 mins) for dinner tonight, and I make rice in it most of the time.
When we’re more ambitious we make hummus, soups, hot sauce (in bulk for canning) and chili.
All the things. Curries, stews, pasta, rice, yogurt, cheesecake, roast chicken, steamed veggies, hard boiled eggs. I need another one for the other house.
Veggie stock
Rice/Risotto
Boiled eggs
Yogurt
Steel cut oats
Quinoa
Chicken to use in salads
Spaghetti squash!
Winter squash in general!
Cooking squash to use in casseroles instead of either noodles or sauce is the top of my can’t-go-back-to-no-multi-cooker list. 8 minutes. Perfect spaghetti squash. YUM. Making yogurt is a close second.
I tend to use it to make base ingredients in one day of meal prep that I can throw together during the week. So a batch of rice and a batch of quinoa flavored only with veggie stock (instead of using water), then I can just make piles of food for lunches and dinners with the grains as a base, or on greens, with whatever spices/herbs I feel like eating that day.
We use ours constantly. Some of our favorites are
Pork Chili Verde
Chicken and Chickpea Masala
Enchiladas (granted we just use the instant pot for the filling, but it takes 15 minutes instead of hours)
Pho
Beef and Chicken stock
Marinara (if I’m short on time. The 4 hour stove top version is maybe 25% better than 45 minutes in the instant pot)
I think that even if I only made yoghurt with It, the instant pot would pay for itself over time. Everything else i could make on the stove or in a slow cooker, but i had never made good homemade yoghurt until i had an instant pot.
The speed with which it cooks beans is also delightful. If I forget to soak beans it’s ok. Magic!
I regularly cook beans from dry and hard-boil eggs in mine. I also cook grains (rice and farro). I’ve never actually made a whole meal in one at a time, but it occurs to me that cooking grains and beans together would probably work just fine…
My method, due to laziness: chop in half, put in cut side down with 1 cup of water, high pressure for 8 minutes, then scoop out seeds.
It’s not as tasty for plain squash as roasting, but it’s so easy I tend to eat way more squash than before I had a multicooker.
I second what Elle said re: dried beans! Back when I could eat beans all the time (sob) my stovetop pressure cooker had regular use. So fast, and sooooo creamy! I like pressure cooked beans much better than slow cooked or stovetop.
Mostly rice. Sometimes curries or soups. I keep meaning to try roasted garlic but haven’t yet.
The main advantage for me is being able to leave it on the counter and let it do its thing without worrying that my cats (who have a fetish for open flame and hot ovens) are going to fuck with it and injure themselves!
Chicken takes longer than pasta, but you can totally cook the chicken in the sauce, let off pressure and open, insert pasta and cook just a little longer to have everything together in one pot.
This “add later” method also works for using quick brown rice in a curry, or adding frozen veggies to a “stir fry” and keeping them non-mushy.
One thing I forgot: the world’s best collard greens come from an instantpot. Eating some now.
Quoting myself to say I mean parboiled brown rice. If you use regular brown rice, it cooks the whole time the curry does, maybe a little more depending on ingredients.
