Using Instant Pot To Cook Pasta

I am always a fan of trying to do more things with kitchen appliances. One of those wonder appliances is the Instant Pot. It can serve as a pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, yogurt maker, and even to sauté.

One thing I was curious about is whether the sauté function could boil water. Turns out when set to More, it certainly can boil water. This means it can also cook pasta. The trick is to not overfill the pot with water or pasta because pasta is prone to bubble, fizz, and boil over. That will happen if you overfill it.

My recommendation is to cook half of the box at a time. If cooking longer noodles like spaghetti or fettuccini, you should break the pasta in half so it can fit.

Here are the directions:

• Fill the pot liner with water to the max fill line.
• Bring the water to a boil on the Sauté More setting.
• Drop in 8oz of pasta (half a box).
• Cook for the amount of time on the box and watch carefully.
• If it bubbles and fizzes, give the pasta a stir or even blow carefully on it being careful not to steam your face. The bubbles should subside.
• Test a noodle and once it reaches the desired doneness, turn off the Instant Pot.
• Use oven mitts to lift the liner out, strain in the sink and enjoy.

Now, it turns out that isn't the only way to cook pasta in an Instant Pot. Someone has figured out how to use the pressure cooker setting. The instructions are on InquiringChef.com. The neat part about the recipe is that all the water used gets absorbed. The pasta becomes extra starchy this way and really sticks to pasta sauce.

I tried this process, and again I recommend only using half the box of pasta. The full box did bubble and fizz inside the chamber, so when I released the steam, the starchy water would splatter out of the top with the steam. But it sure was nice not to have to dump out water. It is recommended not to cook long noodles using this method. For those, I recommend sticking to the boiling method I outlined above.

So next time you need to cook pasta, give either of these methods a try. You never know when being able to cook different things in an Instant Pot will come in handy.