"My son Mark learned to cook with a [stovetop] pressure cooker when he was nineteen years old," Urvashi Pitre writes in the introduction to her forthcoming book, Instant Pot Fast & Easy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January 2019). "I still remember the day he mastered four different dishes in one day. Now, Mark is scary-smart, this is true, but it's also true that pressure cookers are not that complicated."
Pitre—aka the "Butter-Chicken Lady," per New Yorker contributor Priya Krishna—is probably one of the smartest people I've ever talked to; she's a scientist by day and a cookbook author by night. From a single 30-minute phone conversation with her, I learned more about pressure cooking than I have reading about it for years in cookbooks, online, or even in my own kitchen tinkering with my little 3-quart Instant Pot, the electric pressure cooker Pitre also uses for her recipes. In these 30 minutes (about the time it takes for her Instant Pot butter chicken to come together), she expressed her frustration at all of the Instant Pot recipes out there that make you sauté first, when science shows a simple dump-and-cook would do.
"People aren't thinking through how a pressure cooker really cooks," she tells me. "They're not leveraging the full capabilities of the Instant Pot or coming at it from a scientific perspective."
According to Pitre, the Maillard reaction—which is a web of chemical reactions that happen between amino acids and carbohydrates when food is cooked, making it smell and taste great—is often conflated with sautéing, or that "brown crust" we all love on steak.
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“I think when many bloggers jumped on the Instant Pot bandwagon in the beginning, some didn't understand the way a pressure cooker worked and just changed the cooking vessel. I've made some things that weren't all that great and always go back to recipes that I know will work and taste wonderful. As many of us in the Two Sleevers Facebook groups say... #trusturvashi”
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But this conflation disregards that the Maillard reaction can happen without caramelization and at temperatures as low as 130°F (though the lower the temperature, the longer it'll take to achieve the reaction, e.g. even in a slow cooker with liquid, or in a pressure cooker). "In a pressure cooker, the boiling point of water is increased as the pressure rises," Pitre explains. "So a pressure cooker can get to about 230°F, and that’s definitely high enough for Maillard. What this means is that when you put your food in a pressure cooker, essentially that super-heated water starts to create the Maillard reaction even though the environment is moist. It's not an all-or-nothing reaction."
What she was telling me, in short, was that a pressure cooker can create a Maillard reaction, even without the sauté function. This blew my mind.
"It's a mistake to take the moisture out of food by searing it first, and then just adding back plain water," Pitre says about the Instant Pot's sauté function (for which there is, of course, a time and a place, such as when you need to fry spices in oil for a tadka).
Ready to put all of this science to the test, I've collected Pitre's most delicious Instant Pot recipes below, along with a few from Archana Mundhe, author of The Essential Indian Instant Pot Cookbook. Mundhe's recipes celebrate another aspect of the multi-cooker that's worth mentioning here: convenience. "The Instant Pot makes the process more hands-off, especially for Indian cooking," Mundhe writes. "It is a true one-pot experience where you can cook traditional recipes like biryani, pongal, korma, and other dishes that would normally use multiple pots."
When I asked Pitre whether or not Indian food in particular lends itself well to the Instant Pot—perhaps explaining why "Instant Pot recipes Indian" is one of the most searched Instant Pot–related queries according to Google—she said:
"Does it lend itself? Hm, sure. One thing is that Indian food has been prepared in stovetop pressure cookers for years. Indian home cooks have been using them for so long, so when it comes to writing Indian recipes for the Instant Pot, there's no translation needed."
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Our Best Instant Pot IndianRecipes
Instant Pot Butter Chicken by Urvashi Pitre
This 30-minute, Keto-friendly butter chicken recipe’s not-so-secret ingredient is butter, plus paprika and good-quality garam masala. Vegetarians should also feel free to swap in peas and paneer, or tofu, for the chicken.
Archana Mundhe's Instant Pot Butter Chicken
For a slightly different take on butter chicken (here we’ve got ghee and Kashmiri red chile powder), try this recipe.
Instant Pot Indian Tomato Coconut Soup
Though this simple soup of canned coconut milk and tomatoes may not seem any more exciting than a can of soup, think again—thanks to ginger, garlic, turmeric, it’s packed with nuanced flavor.
Instant Pot Indian Kheema Pulao
This dish of spiced ground beef and rice is the most comforting dinner after a long day or a cold walk home. Though it’s technically optional, you shouldn’t skip the spice blend.
Archana Mundhe's Instant Pot Palak Paneer
Creamy and spicy, this palak paneer relies on whizzed-up cashews and a splash of milk (use cashew or coconut milk to make it vegan) instead of heavy cream—the bright green color of the spinach is preserved thanks to a super-quick flash-cook in the Instant Pot.
Instant Pot Lamb & Rice Casserole (Lamb Dum Biryani)
Biryani is usually worth the trouble (lots of different pots; worrying about rice and lamb cooking to the right doneness at the same time; takes several hours). But on busy weeknights, try this version: it’s done in about an hour.
Instant Pot Pea & Paneer Curry
Creamy cheese (or tofu!) and tender peas float in a creamy, tangy coconut-tomato curry.
Archana Mundhe's Instant Pot Spicy Lentils
Simple yellow dal with a swoosh of spicy, garlicky ghee is just as satisfying for breakfast as it is for lunch and dinner.
Instant Pot Sambhar Lentils With Tamarind Paste
These twice-cooked, sour-sweet lentils mixed with warm seasoned ghee are best served with a big pot of rice.
Madhur Jaffrey's Instant Pot Buttery Dal
This dal is a hearty a blend of dry kidney beans and urad, but the real star of the show is the paprika-dusted, ghee-fried onion topping.
What do YOU like to cook in your Instant Pot? Please share your wisdom below.
Urvashi Pitre recipes excerpted from Instant Pot Fast & Easy © 2019 by Urvashi Pitre. Photography © 2019 by Ghazalle Badiozamani. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
Archana Mundhe recipes reprinted with permission from The Essential Indian Instant Pot Cookbook, copyright © 2018 by Archana Mundhe. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Photograph copyright © 2018 by Colin Price.
