How to Use Your Instant Pot, Button by Button

Posted on February 28, 2024 by resourcefulman

The Instant Pot is easy to use because it’s a safe, self-contained all-in-one multi-cooker, but its user interface isn’t exactly intuitive. There are a lot of buttons, and trying to intuit what exactly they do can feel a little… pressured.

What is an instant bank?

The Instant Pot is an electronic multifunctional kitchen appliance that kids will love. He sautes, steams and slow cooks. But the most important thing is the pressure cooker. The Instant Pot has brought pressure cooking back into the average home cook’s skill set: What was once a separate, bulky appliance notorious for being forgotten and then blown up on the stove is now electronic and significantly safer. If you’re looking for recipe ideas, here’s the top thing you should cook with your Instant Pot, plus a few surprising things .

Although there are other brands now making similar “slow cookers”, the Instant brand popularized this device, so the term “instant pot” can colloquially refer to all of them. The buttons mentioned in this article are found on an Instant brand Instant Pot.

Instant Pot Parts

Regardless of the model, all Instant Pots have the same basic components:

Base: This is the main part of the machine. This is where the navigation panel is located, as well as the main electronics and heating element. There is also a clear condensate collector on the base, usually at the back where the lid is hinged, which can be removed and emptied after cooking.
Lid: This does the same thing as any lid, with an important difference: a steam release switch. The steam release switch, or valve, can be opened manually for a faster, more controlled release of steam, or you can leave the pan to depressurize naturally, which will take a little longer. There may also be a small plastic dot near the exhaust valve. This is a float valve, a visual reminder of whether the tank is currently under pressure. The float valve will rise when the tank is pressurized; it will go all the way down if it doesn’t.
Inner Pot: This is where all your great ingredients go. It is located inside the base cavity.
Optional Accessories: Many models come with measuring cups, utensils, trivets and steam trays. While you can use your own measuring cups for recipes, accessories are helpful because they fit the pan perfectly and are made from materials that won’t scratch or damage the pan.

How to use the Instant Pot

I would say “read the manual” but honestly it’s confusing. (Also, they just changed their manual when I wrote this, so I’m worried about the concept of the manual.) When you read about the “bird” button, for example, the manual simply says that the button is for “bird”. dishes” and that you can adjust the cooking time depending on your “texture preferences and the amount of bird you put in the pan.” It’s a little vague for my taste—skin-on, bone-in thighs cook very differently than boneless, skinless tenderloin—and I wanted some clarity, dammit. ( Please note: There are many versions of the Instant Pot with functionality, and your buttons may be slightly different from mine; if there is any confusion, please refer to the manual.)

Basic buttons

We’ll get to all of those specific function buttons shortly, but first let’s get comfortable with the buttons you’ll use most often: Manual, Sauté, Keep Warm/Cancel, Pressure, +, and -. and “adjustment”:

Manual Mode: This is the basic setting of the pressure cooker and you can use it to cook most foods except yogurt or fermented glutinous rice. Once your food is placed in the sealed pan with the pressure switch switched to the “sealing” position, you can use this feature by pressing the “Manual” button once and then adjusting the time using 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” (10.2-11.6 psi pressure and 239-244°F) , but you can set it to lower pressure and temperature (5.8-7.2 psi and temperature 239-244°F). 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).
Saute: This button keeps your meat from looking sad and pale, and it will help you impart a roasted, seared, caramelized flavor to your food before sealing it for pressure storage. It has three temperature ranges: Normal (320-349°F) , More (347-410°F), and Less (275-302°F) , which you can switch between using the Adjust button. » In addition to searing and searing, you can use the saute function to simmer sauces and thicken them after cooking; just be sure to stir frequently as the bottom of the insert gets very hot. This goes without saying, but don’t fry with the lid on.
Keep Warm/Cancel: This button is for those times when you need to abruptly announce that “DINNER IS CANCELED,” or just stop a cooking program really quickly because you just remembered you forgot to add thyme or some crap. Pressing this button puts the Instant Pot into a “standby state,” which is a fancy way of saying “off.” Once it enters the “standby state”, pressing it again puts the pan into “keep warm” mode, which keeps your food at a very wide temperature range: 145-172°F . Plus, you don’t have to press “keep warm/ cancel” to keep your food warm, as the slow cooker will automatically switch to this mode at the end of your selected cooking program (for an insane 99 hours and 50 minutes). ).
Pressure: This button changes not only the pressure of the “manual” setting, but also every single “function” except “saute”, “yogurt” and “slow cook”.
+ and -: These babies change the cooking time in the “manual” program, but do not work if you use one of the pre-programmed function buttons, such as “beans”, because having one button to control the cooking time would be too easy, and home chefs need to be challenged.
Setup: This is the button you want to use when changing the cooking time of pre-programmed foods such as “beans”, excluding rice. Want to change the cooking time for your rice? You can’t, fool. Rice is “fully automatic”. It also allows you to select a yogurt program, which I honestly haven’t tried yet, which is why I find the Instant Pot yogurt process so overwhelming.

Now that we’ve covered the basic buttons, let’s move on to the pre-programmed dudes.

Unusual function buttons

I don’t use them, but that’s mainly because I don’t trust the one-size-fits-all approach to pressure cooking. According to the Instant Pot website , a very smart microchip controls the cooking process by manipulating “four parameters”: heat intensity, temperature, pressure and duration.

For example, if you press the “soup” button, the slow cooker will look like this: “Gee, no one is going to stir this soup, so we better not heat the bottom of this pot too much,” but if you press “steam,” that’s it “The food doesn’t even touch the insert; let’s turn it up to “11”. When you use the multi-grain function, the pan soaks the grains at 140°F for 50 minutes (no pressure), then increases the temperature to about 248°F and just under 11 psi respectively.

While the Instant Pot nerds don’t detail every feature in words, they do provide graphs, which is great considering I only took a thermodynamics course because I promised Dr. Brukat, who I would never work with, by talking about him, or think about the topic if he just let me out of P-khim 1 with a C grade.

Anyway, let’s look at these graphs:

Bean/chili function

This 39-minute program begins by rapidly increasing the temperature and pressure and holding them at about 230°F and 11 psi (that is, “low” temperature with “high” pressure), respectively.

Soup Function

Okay, there are some problems with this chart. Our Y axis shows “0.00” and “0.20” where “100” and “120” should be, but otherwise the soup program seems pretty simple. We do 47 minutes at medium pressure, just under 9 psi (lower than our “high” manual setting and higher than our “low”), and a temperature of 23o°F .

Multigrain function

As we mentioned earlier, this feature starts with a 50-minute hold at 140 degrees (no pressure), then increases to about 248°F and just under 11 psi (high pressure) respectively and holds. about nine more minutes .

Meat/Stew function

This 28-minute program basically runs at 230°F and about 8.7 psi (which is low, but still higher than the manual “low” setting).

Decoction function

The congee function is very similar to the meat/stew function, with a temperature profile of about 230°F and a pressure of about 8 psi .

On some newer Instant Pots, all of these functions can be controlled by pressing the appropriate function button to change it from “normal” to “more” or “less.” As you’d expect, choosing “more” will cook the food better, and choosing “less” will cook the food less. There are no graphs for these settings, and there are no graphs for “cake,” “eggs,” “poultry,” “steam,” or “sterilize.”

From what I’ve gathered on Reddit , you want to use “more” for the cheesecake, which is the only cake you should be cooking in this thing anyway. For eggs, I’ve found that the adjustable “steam” function produces perfectly cooked eggs that can be peeled . I’m frustrated by the lack of a timetable for cooking the bird, but according to Pressure Cooking Today , the cook time on “high” pressure is 15 minutes, which I think would be overkill for something like skinless, boneless chicken breast.

There is also no schedule for rice because rice is completely automatic and adapts perfectly no matter how much rice you put in it, as long as you have the right water ratio, or so I thought; the vibe is “Please stop asking about our magic function of rice, we don’t have time to explain it to you.”

Other unusual buttons

In addition to the pre-programmed buttons that enable pressure cooking, there are also non-pressure functions such as “slow cook”, “yogurt” and “saute”. We’ve already covered the last question, but let’s look at the other two.

Slow Cooking: “Normal” will give you a temperature of 190–200°F, while “less” and “more” will give you 180–190°F and 200–210°F, respectively. If you have a particular brand of slow cooker that you’re used to using, check its manual to compare temperatures.
Yogurt: The yogurt function is not a “throw everything in there and open it later” deal. There are many steps, including removing the insert from the Instant Pot , and you should refer to the manual or this post from Team Yogurt , which dares to ask, “Is it worth it?”

All these graphs and numbers may seem a little overwhelming at first, but the best way to start cooking is to try a few recipes, starting with recipes written for “manual mode.” You can also make a cheesecake or two . Cheesecake always calms me down.

More…

Food & Drinks