Cooking from Cookbooks: Dinner in an Instant

It’s no secret, the Instant Pot® is insanely popular. A popularity boosted by Amazon Prime Day where 300,000 of them were sold in 2018. There are legions and legions of people participating in Instant Pot Communities on Facebook. People are downright fanatical about their Instant Pots. Take this post by Scary Mommy for example- she even refers to herself as an “Instant Pot Evangelist.” So, it is no wonder Cambridge Center for Adult Education asked to teach an Instant Pot Cooking Class this August. You know, give a sort of sermon at the Church of Instant Pot.

“Why not?” I thought, “I own an Instant Pot and I cook with it.”

When I accepted the gig, I didn’t consider the fact that I am not actually one of the Instant Pot faithful. Gasp!

It is a pressure cooker, not a miracle, not a life saver and not even a huge technological breakthrough. The Instant Pot is just an electric pressure cooker. Breath! Thing will be okay. We will survive this revelation. Really, we will.

“But it’s more than a pressure cooker,” you say. “It is ‘7 kitchen appliances in 1!'” Well, the other 6 functions are derivatives of the pressure cooker function. It’s true. Trust me, I am an engineer.

I am not saying I don’t like my Instant Pot, I am just saying it is just another tool in my kitchen – a pressure cooker. It is a reasonably good pressure cooker. It has some very convenient features. And, yes, I do use it quite often, but it has its limitations.

So, when I taught this Instant Pot Cooking Class, I found it hard to convert my flock into being one of the Instant Pot faithful. I aimed for realism and letting them know what recipes I think the Instant Pot does best. Since this an installment of the Cooking from Cookbooks project, I do want to get to the Dinner in an Instant cookbook. So, I will summarize my Instant Pot preferences in a nutshell and maybe dig deeper some other day.

Best Ways to Use an Instant Pot

• Substitute for a slow cooker, but faster. In other words, those one pot meals like soups, stews, chilis, curries and dried beans.
• Braised meats like pulled pork and beef roasts. For pork shoulders, I cook on high pressure for at LEAST 60 minutes no matter what the recipe says.
• Rice, Grains and Risotto. As a child, we had rice three meals a day. This makes rice better than my cheap spring loaded cooker.
• Soft/Hard Boiled Eggs in large batches. I don’t bother for my daily breakfast, but if I want to do a dozen eggs, yes. Despite what anyone says, yes, eggs can be overcooked in the Instant Pot. Egg proteins fully denature around 170°F. The Instant Pot reaches temperatures above 212°F (boiling), so you still need pay attention to the time and cool them immediately.
• Cheesecake. It is better than a bain marie in the oven.

One of the questions I had not anticipated in the class was “What Instant Pot Cookbooks do you recommend?” I had mostly modified slow cooker recipes and gotten recipe ideas from the internet. I looked at a few books, but most of them seemed like they were hurriedly published in response to the new trend. And, as far as I could tell, most chefs were ignoring this fad. So, I figured I would investigate.

Dinner in an Instant by Melissa Clark

I opt to enter into the Instant Pot cookbook fray with Melissa Clark’s cookbook “Dinner in an Instant: 75 Modern Recipes for your Pressure Cooker, Multicooker + Instant Pot®.” Clark is a food columnist for the New York Times Cooking Section. Although I don’t tend to splay my NYT on the counter to make a recipe, I do appreciate Clark’s recipes. I figure that is enough food cred for me to invest $14 in her book.

Unlike the other cookbooks Instant Pot craze genre that appear hastily produced, this one is attractive and easy to read. It is a slim volume full of carefully stylized, mouth-watering photos with a clean layout. There’s not a bunch of prose trying to make this cookbook into flowery story-telling. I appreciate that because I don’t usually spend much reading the memoiry parts of other cookbooks (strangely, the memoiry parts attract me to some cookbooks even though I don’t read them).

In the first line of the cookbook, Clark admits to being initially uninterested in the Instant Pot. I appreciate that. It took a NYT assignment to get her to try one out. She is not an evangelist either and she explains that she doesn’t ask the appliance to do more than just be a pressure cooker.

However, the title of the book is misleading. There aren’t too many recipes in this book that are “instant.” Of course, that is a complaint I have of the Instant Pot in general. It is not as fast as the evangelist try to tell me. Many of them emphatically praise it first for speed and convenience even moreso than for flavor. Focusing in the pressurized cooking time, they tend to overlook the rest of the time. Compared to a slow cooker, sure, the Instant Pot is faster than all day simmer. But for a regular old weeknight dinner, it isn’t all that fast. Once prepped ingredients make it to the pot, it needs time to heat up (15-20 minutes). Then, once pressurized there is the cooking time (10-60 minutes). And, finally, there is pressure release time (2 minutes for manual or 20-30 for natural).

For cooking a dump recipe, which is how many people cook with it, the Instant Pot feels faster because all the ingredients can be dumped into the pot before turining it on and walking away. This totally hands off aspect of cooking means reclaiming time fussing over a hot pot to do other stuff. And when the Pot beeps, dinner is “instantly” done. Fully cooked with zero concern for anything being undercooked or raw.

Most of Clark’s recipes, are not “dump-style.” There is also the addition of sauteing the ingredients and many saute some ingredients separately. This stretches the concept of instant. It also stretches the concept of “hands off.” Except when the lid is finally locked, the recipes require attentive cooking.

I will likely never make any of the seafood dishes. These recipes use either the saute function to cook the seafood or a very short (1-2 minute) pressure cook. This is understandable because seafood really doesn’t work well in either a slow cooker or a pressure cooker. For this, I will head to the stove for best results.

The Recipe – Wine-Braised Oxtails with Fennel

When I picked up my meat share from Chestnut Farms CSA, I was excited to see the extras box had oxtails. I have no idea what to do with oxtails, but I love getting odd bits to try out. So, I grabbed two packages. They sat in the freezer for the next few months, but when I saw the Wine-Braised Oxtail with Fennel recipe in Clark’s cookbook, I thought it was the perfect time to dig them out.

Admittedly, picking oxtails as a recipe to prove the cookbook is not very “instant” is a bit back handed because oxtails need a long time to cook no matter what. I concede to stacking the deck in my anti-instant favor for this critique.

A heavy, meaty stew also isn’t really summer fare, but Waltham Fields Community Farms CSA had fennel the previous week’s share and I thought I’d see it again. I seems all the CSAs were aligning to make this recipe happen. Unfortunately, I didn’t get fennel this week. So it goes.

However, I had thawed oxtails already and I don’t want to supplement my CSA vegetables. So, I decide to stray from the exact letter of the recipe and substitute. I use onions for the fennel and leeks. When my husband eats the CSA carrots, I also substitute waxy potatoes for carrots. Despite this being a “Cooking from Cookbooks” experiment, I figure Clark herself offered variations on wine-braised oxtails in her column, so substitutes are perfectly acceptable to her too.

My oxtails are whole. Rather than Google a video explaining how to cut and oxtail, I just go at it with a cleaver. Not the best idea, but I manage. I later googled it and learned there are “knuckles” in the tail. I did manage to hit a few by luck.

Once divided, the oxtails need to marinade for at least an hour or overnight. That is super instant, right? Then again, I doubt I would ever tackle oxtails on short notice. Meanwhile, I prep the other ingredients, add mushrooms on a lark and pick herbs from the garden. I also select a bottle of wine for braising, sacrificing a nicer bottle than I normally cook with for the sake of experimenting.

Completing the marinading and it is time for the sauteing step. I saute the oxtails in batches separately from the vegetables. The saute function on the Instant Pot works, but it’s not extremely hot. Next time, I might opt to sear in a single batch on my really big cast iron pan while the vegetables saute in the Instant Pot to speed things up.

Once done with all the sauteing, I snatch a small pour for myself then reluctantly pour the rest of my nice bottle of wine and wait. It simmers for 15 minutes, but the liquid has not reduced by half, as indicated. But I trudge forward and return the oxtails to the pan. I am now 90-minutes into this instant recipe.

I finally add the oxtails back to the pan, put on the lid, lock it and set the pot for 60 minutes. The recipe only calls for 45 minutes, but these meaty, fatty, marrowy oxtails can easily take more time.

After nearly three hours in process, I manually release the pressure. There is still more hands on cooking to go. I scoop the oxtails and vegetables out to a bowl and return the pot to saute. Even though the pot contains 4-cups of liquid, Clark asks to reduce it by half. This could take a long time. So, I transfer the liquid to a wider pan to reduce it on the stove.

Despite the vibrant and fresh photos in Clark’s book, I find it hard to make pressure cooked stews look great in my own photos. This is one of my better beauty shots. The oxtails still contain a lot of marrow. So, I remove the meat and return the bones and liquid to the pressure cooker for another pressurized round to render that marrow. Actually, they also simmer overnight to get even more yield.

And there you have it, dinner in an instant.

Happy Cooking and Instant Potting.

(Note, Instant Pot is a registered trademark. I used the little ® the first time, but got lazy after that. I imply the trademark throughout.)