Recently, I got a rice cooker and I found it easy to cook my rice with. I found it as a lifesaver because it allowed me to continue working while my rice was cooking. I later was looking up a bean cooker and I came across a bean cooker on Amazon that didn’t have a good rating or this InstantPot Pressure Cooker. I decided to do a lot of research on pressure cookers, InstantPot in particular and I decided it was a must have.
If your vegan or not and you like to make your own food, you need to invest in a pressure cooker. They have been out for decades and I know people talk about how they are dangerous. They have come a long way in the past 30 years. They have so many safety features and it’s almost impossible to injure yourself with them.
First let’s talk about the time cooking this thing does. It takes about 8 minutes to cook navy beans. If you were to do it over the stovetop, it would take about 2 hours to do. This would save you 1 hour and 52 minutes. Holy cow, that’s a lot of time saved. Quinoa takes 1 minute vice 15 minutes over the stove top. That is 15x faster cooking than conventional. You can cook all kinds of meats, porridges, jams, etc. You name it, you can cook it.
Secondly, let’s talk about the money saved. A 16-oz can of non-BPA beans costs about $2.99. This is an extreme price. You can buy 2-lbs of dry beans for the same price and cook them to get 5 cans of beans equivalent. Yes, you get approximately 2.5x of cooked beans from dried beans. This is a total of $12 of savings for every 5 cans of beans. I don’t know about you, but beans and rice are my goto for base ingredients in just about any recipe. You also save a lot of money on time your electrical appliances are on. You are saving about 1kW hour for each time you cook a meal. I know this may not sound like a lot for just one meal, but over the course of time it saves you a lot of money on your electric bill.
Thirdly, let’s talk about the nutrients and quality. Since you are not letting any steam out, all the nutrients stay contained in the food. That is no nutrient lost so it’s almost close to having the quality of raw food. Are any of you familiar with a slow-cooker? Well a slow-cooker takes about 8 hours to cook your food. This will cook it in as quickly as 8 minutes and have it more tastier and juicer than the slow-cooker will ever make it. I grew up with a slow-cooker and I do love slow-cookers, but this InstantPot makes a slow-cooker outdated.
Forthly, let’s talk about all the features. There are so many features on this device, you will never even use them all. Aside from toying with the manual mode (which is really the only mode I use) you have options for soup, meat/stew, bean/chili, poultry, rice, multigrain, porridge, steam, slow cooker, saute, manual, and yogurt. You can adjust the pressures as well as the automatic timer. I even made breakfast and jams with this thing. It’s 6 quarts, so be sure to eat it all or eat it for left overs.
So the technology in cooking it fast is keeping the temperature in an enclosed area at high pressure. This infuses your food with the juices you put into it and allowing it to cook faster. It’s surprising that not many people use these things, yet they have been out for so long.
I have people tell me that they still aren’t exactly convinced because they don’t understand how food can safely cook that fast. All I can say is, try it like I did, you will be amazed.
So are you still not completely sold on the idea? Just try it and you won’t be sorry. What’s the worse that can happen? Free shipping return with Amazon? That’s just hilarious.
Here is the link so you can read more: http://instantpot.com
I also recommend getting the book “Vegan Pressure Cooker” by JL Fields. It’s one of my top favorite books and makes Pressure Cooking easy.