Instant Pot I brought it to my mother-in-law’s house to spend Thanksgiving. This is not the purpose. I took it to her place to test it out for this review, but when her oven died on Thanksgiving night, I got creative, putting Mark Bittman’s pre-mixed gravy into the Instant Pot using its sautéing function. I also made Melissa Clark’s pressure-steamed sour cream mashed potatoes and a pressure-boiled egg that popped out of the shell for a gobbled egg. As for the turkey, the 3.5-pound boneless breast is in the shape of a rugby ball, it spent the night in the Pot using the sous-vide function and came out just like any other I’ve ever done. It was an impromptu trip that took multi in a multi-function box.
This is Pro PlusInstant Pot’s newest and perhaps best pressure cooker. At $170, it’s also the most expensive six-liter option. It does all that versatile stuff: pressure cooking, slow cooking, sautéing, steaming, and sous vides, all with a pleasingly simple interface. However, Plus in its name – it raison de plus, if you want — to be the “smart” or connected side of things, and for now, at least, that’s a big minus. By connecting the pot to the mobile app, you can unlock a “guided cooking” experience in which you follow recipes on screen as the app modifies the machine to cook. show step by step. At least for now, that side of things should be ignored.
I’ll start by telling you why and try to be brief, because there’s a lot of good stuff to reach.
On the app, you can choose from an impressive array of recipes — more than 1,000, and the number is growing. The app lets you choose how many servings you want and then scale the recipe up or down accordingly. However, once you cook, problems appear quickly.
I start with a pozole recipe that calls for a pound or “about 1 3/4 cup, cubes” of pork shoulder, followed by an onion and three cloves of garlic, both “minced,” followed by chili peppers. chipotle canned in adobo sauce the mysterious amount of “3 (about 1.31 lb),” also chopped. Next, we have to “set aside” “1.56 lb (about 4 1/4 cups)” of hominy.
Hoo, boy. Those who use cookbooks regularly will notice the inaccuracies here. For those five components, I had more than five questions. Here’s one: How big are those chunks of pork? Pressure cooking can be just enough, but small pellets will dry out and overly large ones may not have the succulent level we crave. Is that pork boned? Should it be cut? It doesn’t say. Have you seen other recipes where the amount of meat is measured in cups? Now, what about onions and garlic – are they minced to the same size? That would be a strange thing. By the way, how big? Should we peel the garlic? For 1.31 pounds of chipotle in adobo… well, that can get spicy! I’m used to seeing a few tablespoons or even a few chili peppers in recipes, but how can we be sure of more than pork? Then it’s 1.56 pounds of hominy to be exact. If I look back at the caption, I can guess it’s canned, not dried, but how many cans is that?
Considering the Pro Plus currently only comes in one size – six liters – and I usually choose the default recipe size, all of these odd quantity measurements really stuck.
I had a similar problem with eggplant, tomato, and tagine green beans, where “grape tomatoes, 2 (about .63 oz)” turned out to mean two pints, eggplant cut into “cubs” and 2 1/2 teaspoon salted kosher is also said to be .25 oz, the latter being a single format option. How big are your sections, readers? And are you using Diamond Kosher salt? Because if you’re using Morton’s denser kosher with a measuring spoon, you can put in more of what they’re asking for.
Here’s a recipe quote from page one of one of my favorite reference books, Recipe Writer’s Handbook, by Barbara Gibbs Ostmann and Jane L. Baker.
