What Your Instant Buttons Mean
The Instant Pot is as easy to use as it is a very safe, self-contained, versatile multicooker, but its user interface is not entirely intuitive. There are a lot of buttons, and trying to intuitively understand what exactly they do can cause a little … pressure.
I would say “read the manual,” but to be honest, it’s a little confusing. (Also, they just changed their manual when I wrote this, so I’m outraged by this manual as a concept.) For example, when you read about the bird button, the manual simply says the button is for the bird. dishes ”and that you can adjust the cooking time based on“ texture preferences and the amount of poultry you put in the pan ”. It’s a bit vague to my taste – thighs with skin and bones are not prepared at all like a tenderloin without skin and bones – and I wanted more clarity, damn it. ( Note: There are many versions of Instant Pot, the functions and your buttons may differ slightly from my buttons; consult the manual if you get confused.)
Basic buttons
We’ll get to all of these function buttons shortly, but first, let’s take a look at the buttons you’ll use the most: manual, sauté, warm / cancel, pressure, + AND – and adjust “:
- Manual: This is the main pressure cooker setting with which you can cook most foods, with the exception of yoghurt or fermented glutinous rice. When your food is placed in a sealed pot with pressure relief switching to “sealing”, you can use this function by manually pressing once and then adjusting the time with the “+” and “-” buttons. Then you just walk away and let the Instant Pot do its thing. By default the pressure cooker is set to “high” (pressure 10.2-11.6 psi and temperature 239-244 ° F) , but you can set it to lower pressure and temperature (5.8-7.2 lb per square inch and 229-233 ° F) by pressing the “pressure” button (I’ve never used the low pressure setting, but I think it’s nice to know it’s there.)
- Sauté: This button prevents your meat from looking sad and pale, and will add a fried, toasted, caramelized flavor to your food before sealing it to increase pressure. It has three temperature ranges , Normal (320–349 ° F) , Higher (347–410 ° F), and Less (275–302 ° F) , which you can switch between by pressing adjust. ”In addition to browning and searing, you can use the sauté function to sauté and thicken the sauces after cooking; just remember to stir frequently, as things get very hot at the bottom of the liner. This should be taken for granted, but do not extinguish with the lid closed.
- Warm Up / Cancel: This button is for when you need to abruptly announce “DINNER CANCELED” or just quickly stop a cooking program because you just remembered that you forgot to add thyme or some other nonsense. Pressing this button puts the Instant Pot into a “standby” state, which is a fancy way of saying “off”. When it is in the “standby” state, pressing it again will put the pan into “keep warm” mode, in which food remains in a very wide temperature range of 145-172 ° F. Also, you do not need to press “warm / cancel” to keep food. warm, as the Instant Pot will automatically switch to this mode at the end of the selected cooking program (up to a crazy 99 hours and 50 minutes.).
- Pressure: This button not only changes the pressure manually, but all functions except sauté, yoghurt and slow cook.
- + and -: These babies change the cooking time in the “manual” program, but do not work if you use one of the preprogrammed function buttons, for example “beans”, because having one button to control the cooking time would be too easy and homemade chefs need to be challenged.
- Adjust: This is the button you want to use when changing the cooking time for preprogrammed ones such as “beans” except for rice. Want to change the cooking time of your rice? You can’t, you fool. Rice is “fully automatic”. It also allows you to choose a yogurt making program that I honestly haven’t tried yet, which is why I find the Instant Pot yogurt making process so overwhelming.
Now that we’ve covered the basic buttons, let’s move on to the preprogrammed guys.
Fancy function buttons
I don’t use them, but that’s mostly because I don’t trust the one-size-fits-all approach to pressure cooking. According to the Instant Pot website , a highly intelligent microchip controls food preparation by manipulating “four parameters”: heat intensity, temperature, pressure and duration.
If you hit the soup button, for example, the Instant Pot will be like “gee, nobody’s going to stir this soup, so we’d better not heat the bottom of this pot too much,” but if you hit steam, that’s it. “no food even touching the insert; let’s turn it to 11 “. When you use the multi-grain feature, the pot soaks the beans at 140 ° F for 50 minutes (no pressure) and then rises to both 248 ° F and slightly less than 11 psi, respectively.
While the Instant Pot nerds don’t give each function in detail in words, they do provide graphs, which is great considering I passed my thermodynamics lesson only with a promise to Dr. if he just let me out of P-chem 1 to “C”.
Anyway, let’s take a look at these graphs:
Bean / Chili Function
This 39 minute program begins by raising the temperature and pressure and holding them at 230 ° F and 11 psi (ie “low” temperature with “high” pressure), respectively.
Soup Function
Ok, this graph has some problems. Our y-axis shows “.00” and “.20” where “100” and “120” should be, but otherwise the soup program seems pretty straightforward. We do 47 minutes at an average pressure of less than 9 psi (below our manual setting “high” and above “low”) and a temperature of 23 ° F.
Multigrain function
As we mentioned earlier, this feature starts with a 140 degree soak , 50 minutes (no pressure), then gradually increases to 248 ° F and just under 11 psi (high pressure), respectively, and holds it. another nine minutes .
Meat / braising function
This 28 minute program mostly hovers at 230 ° F and around 8.7 psi (which is low, but still higher than the manual “low” setting).
Decoction function
The brew function is very similar to the meat / stew function, with a temperature profile of about 230 ° F and a pressure that hovers around 8 psi .
In some of the newer Instant Pots, all of these functions can be controlled by pressing the corresponding function button to change from “normal” to “higher” or “lower”. As you would expect, choosing “more” cooks more food and choosing “less” less. There are no graphs for these settings, and there are no graphs for pie, eggs, poultry, steam, or sterilization.
From what I’ve gathered on Reddit , you want to use “more” for the cheesecake, which is the only pie you have to make in this thing anyway. In terms of eggs, I have found that the adjustable steam function allows you to cook perfectly cooked eggs without the skin . I’m disappointed with the lack of a poultry schedule, but according to Press Cooking Today , that means a 15 minute cook time at “high” pressure, which in my opinion would be overkill for something like skinless chicken breast. and bones.
There is also no graph for rice, because the rice is fully automatic and adjusts perfectly no matter how much rice you add it, as long as you have the correct water ratio or so I was led to believe; the atmosphere is like, “Please stop asking about our magical function of rice, we don’t have time to explain it to you.”
Other fashion buttons
In addition to the preprogrammed buttons that enable pressure cooking, there are also non-pressure functions such as slow cook, yoghurt and sauté. We’ve already covered this last question, but let’s turn to the other two.
- Slow Cooking: Normal will give you 190-200 ° F, and less and more at 180-190 ° F and 200-210 ° F, respectively. If you have a specific brand of multicooker that you’re used to, refer to its manual for how temperatures compare.
- Yoghurt: The function of yoghurt is not “throw it all in there and then open it.” There are many steps, including removing the liner from the Instant Pot , and you should refer to the manual or this post from Team Yogurt daring to ask, “Is it worth it?”
All of these charts and numbers may seem a little tedious at first, but it’s best to start cooking by trying a few recipes, starting with recipes written for “manual mode”. You can also make a cheesecake or two . Cheesecake always calms me down.