You have to significantly reduce liquids as there is no evaporation during the pressure cycle. Nearly in half With brown rice (22 min at high +10 min NPR) I do 1.25 cups water with 1 cup rice… stovetop is 2:1
Significant diff of time needed for dry beans or presoaked beans… you could end up with beans turning to mush or being undercooked. Also seems to me that getting the liquids just right would be a real challenge. I bet there are recipes out there that account for this… still I tend to cook my beans separate (usually under pressure) and combine later.
Cook your beans with good aromatics and they will infuse with flavor just fine… get them “al dente” cooked alone and then finish in the chili. I did Royal Corona beans in tomato sauce yesterday… got the beans most of the way there under pressure (16 min with NPR) and then finished in the sauce low and slow till the beans got creamy.
This time grid is really useful as a starting point for dry or soaked beans
Yep. Made a chickpea, beef, sweet potato, rainbow chard stew last night (still getting the hang of cooking times for legumes/beans, but at least the liquid ratio worked out well) last night in a 6qt. Had enough for 5 servings.
The 6 qt seems to be plenty for us. We eat a lot with my in-laws and even with 4, we usually have a good deal of leftovers.
We used our slow cooker a ton prior to getting the Instant Pot and the quality of food in the IP just seems way better (less muddled flavors, better texture, etc).
We got the Ultra and I need to dive into some of the features besides pressure, sauté, and reheat…
We recently went to a cooking demo by Rick Bayless. He raved about them so we ordered one. A quick google search reveals a bunch of recipes. Definitely worth a look.
So far, looks good, but it illustrates my problem with the instant pot. With all the prepping, sauteing, reducing, bringing up to pressure (twice), and reducing again, it’s still a 2 hour plus recipe. If I did it in a le cresuet in the oven, how much longer would it take? Maybe an hour at most? Either way it’s way too long for a weeknight, and the extra hour barely makes a difference on the weekend.
Also, the instant pot bottom is way too small for browning, so you need to use extra pans anyway.
This is not a stove top pressure cooker. It is a self-contained unit that is fully programmable. You can choose your settings, hit start, and leave it alone.