We noticed that nearly 1/3 of our readers use iPad or Android tablets to browse our website. So we set off to redesign our site with easier access for mobile devices. This caused a bit delay in announcing the recipe contest winners. As an apology to our contest participants, we’ll going to award 4 winners instead of the planned 3.
Here are the winners of our Winter Recipe contest.
Kay A. for a broad range of contributions of 11 recipes. Kay has broken the record to be our most prodigious contributor.
Wendy P. for her simple and easy Miracle Soup, named by her 8 year old.
Angela W. for two recipes with easy to follow instructions.
Congratulations to the winners! We’ll contact you via email. We’d also like to thank all the participants for sharing their recipes. Please keep your recipe coming and you’ll win in a future round.
Meanwhile, here’s the start of our Spring Recipe contest. Please share your home cooking creativity and spread the word about our contest!
The rules of the contest remain unchanged.
The recipes must be for electric pressure cooker, published on publicly accessible websites. If you don’t have a blog or a place to publish, we can put them on InstantPot.com recipe section.
Three prizes of complete sets of Instant Pot accessories (a stainless steel cooking pot, a tempered glass lid and a spare sealing ring) will be awarded. Free shipping to continental US (excluding Hawaii & Alaska) and Canada.
The participant needs to give the right to publish one of their recipes on InstantPot.com.
The contest closes on July 30th, 2013, The winners will be chosen by Instant Pot staff in early August 2013.
Xmas and the New Year are busy time to families as well as businesses. We’ve been bogged down by orders and shipping, causing the delay of announcing the winners of our 2012 Autumn recipe contest. Without further ado, the winners are:
Congratulations to the winners! Meanwhile, we’d also like to thank all the participants for sharing their recipes.
Meanwhile, let’s start the Winter recipe contest. In the words of the British poet Edith Sitwell,
“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
Please share your home cooking creativity and spread the word about our contest!
The rules of the contest remain unchanged.
The recipes must be for electric pressure cooker, published on publicly accessible websites. If you don’t have a blog or a place to publish, we can put them on InstantPot.com recipe section.
Three prizes of complete sets of Instant Pot accessories (a stainless steel cooking pot, a tempered glass lid and a spare sealing ring) will be awarded. Free shipping to continental US (excluding Hawaii & Alaska) and Canada.
The participant needs to give the right to publish one of their recipes on InstantPot.com.
The winners will be chosen by Instant Pot staff in early Apr. 2013.
Laura Pazzaglia is the creator of the popular HipPressureCooking.com, dedicated to make pressure cooking hip. She is more than a prodigious cook, writer and educator. Laura has also devised a simple but ingenious benchmark to measure one key aspect of pressure cooker performance. She calls it evaporation measure. In her own words, this is done as:
“Starting with a “cold cooker” (not heated from a previous test) pour exactly 1000g of water into the liner and pressure cook for 10 minutes, with natural release. Then remove the lid and shake vigorously into the base and pour the contents into a zeroed-out bowl on digital scale. Record the weight of remaining water. “
Dividing the missing water amount over the total gives you evaporation rate. It’s a straight forward measure of leakage of a pressure cooker, which works for both electric and stove-top pressure cookers, probably for stock pots too.
Why is evaporation rate important? In “Modernist Cuisine” (so far the most comprehensive and authentic book on the art and science of cooking), Nathan Myhrvold states that sealed cooking pots trap most aromatic volatiles which make stocks more flavourful (Volume II, pages 292). We also blogged about the astonishing discovery by Dave Arnold at the International Culinary Center that leaking steam means leaking flavour. Dave Arnold’s experiments showed that not all pressure cookers are equal in preserving flavour in stocks. Leaky ones do a bad job, sometimes worse than a stock pot.
Hence, the evaporation rate is not just a simple leakage measure but an indicator of the quality of food the pressure cooker prepares.
What did Laura find out?
“Instant Pot only had an average 2% evaporation during ten minutes of pressure cooking (compared to Cuisinart 4% and most stove top pressure cookers 3.5%).”
Laura has very high standards. Instant Pot didn’t earn a perfect score. She gave IP-LUX60 a “Very Good” rating. We really appreciate Laura straight to-the-point approach and constructive criticism. These give us something to strive to improve upon in our next model.
Darlene P. “Casablanca Chicken” a living proof versatility of Instant Pot for various cuisines.
Congratulations to the winners! Meanwhile, we’d also like to thank all the participants for sharing their recipes.
To quote Albert Camus,
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. “
Autumn is also the seaon of harvest. Abundance of produce and ingredients call for new and creative recipes. Let’s start the Autumn electric pressure cooking recipe contest. Our objectives are to encourage recipe sharing and make it fun and practical to cook with electric pressure cookers. Please spread the word!
The rules of the contest.
The recipes must be for electric pressure cooker, published on publicly accessible websites. If you don’t have a blog or a place to publish, we can put them on InstantPot.com recipe section.
Three prizes of complete sets of Instant Pot accessories (a stainless steel cooking pot, a tempered glass lid and a spare sealing ring) will be awarded. Free shipping to continental US (excluding Hawaii & Alaska) and Canada.
The participant needs to give the right to publish one of their recipes on InstantPot.com.
The winners will be chosen by Instant Pot staff in early Jan. 2013.
It’s well known that cooking rice in a pressure cooker reduces cooking time by half. What about the cooking result? Users told us that rice cooked in Instant Pot is softer, stickier and tasted better. We want to find out what scientists say about this. It turns out that there are quite a few scientific research projects on this subject. The effects of pressure cooking rice, grains and legumes can be summarized on 3 aspects.
1. Texture Change
Cooking under pressure or at higher temperature starch in rice gelatinizes to the maximum degree. This is why pressure cooked rice has a softer and stickier grain texture in comparison to boiled and steamed rice at normal pressure. Under electronic microscope, a grain of rice appears to have more pores when cooked under pressure. Please see the images between magnified 500 and 5000 times. These pores make the rice looks a bit off-white (greyish). Furthermore, tough fibers in brown rice and bran are significantly softer which give the food a better tasting texture.
Rice grain cooked under pressure. Magnified 500 times
Rice grain cooked at normal pressure. Magnified 500 times
Rice grain cooked under pressure. Magnified 5000 times
Rice grain cooked at normal temperature. Magnified 5000 times
2. Improving Digestibility and Increasing Nutritional Value
Starch gelatinization, a change of structure into a form that resembles gelatin, improves digestibility. Pressure cooking rice, grains and beans produces positive nutritional gain, from the increased digestibility of the macronutrients (protein, fiber and starch) and the increased bioavailability of the essential minerals.
Aflatoxin-producing members of Aspergillus are common and widespread in nature.
3. Eliminating Harmful Fungi and Bacteria
Rice, if not stored properly, may carry fungal poisons called aflatoxins, a potent trigger of liver cancer. A survey found that 6% of uncooked rice collected from markets in Seoul contained aflatoxins. Conventional boiling and steaming rice at under 100°C (212°F) is not sufficient to kill all aflatoxins. Study had shown that pressure cooking at higher than 100°C (212°F) was capable of reducing aflatoxin concentrations to safe levels.
Use your pressure cooker for rice cooking. This will make your rice taste better, more digestible and nutritious, and most importantly carcinogenic aflatoxin free.
References
Kataria A, Chauhan BM.: “Contents and digestibility of carbohydrates of mung beans (Vigna radiata L.) as affected by domestic processing and cooking”. Plant Foods Human Nutrition . 1988;38(1):51-9.
Leelayuthsoontorn P, Thipayarat A. “Textural and morphological changes of Jasmine rice under various elevated cooking conditions”. Food Chemistry, 2006, 96(4): 606-613
Rashmi S, Urooj A. “Effect of processing on nutritionally important starch fractions in rice varieties”. International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition. Jan. 2003, 54(1):27-36.
Sagum, R., Jayashree Arcot. “Effect of domestic processing methods on the starch, non-starch polysaccharides and in vitro starch and protein digestibility of three varieties of rice with varying levels of amylose.” Food Chemistry 2000 Vol. 70 No. 1 pp. 107-111
Let’s start by announcing the winners of our Spring contest:
Teresa B. G: Teresa’s Untraditional Beef Rouladen. It’s a living proof that a “hit and miss” recipe can be done well consistently in electric pressure cooker. Her story telling is also most enjoyable.
Congratulations to the winners! Meanwhile, we’d also like to thank all the participants for sharing.
When Spring departs, Summer creeps over. Different season brings different fresh produce. Hopefully these bring inspirations for new recipes. Here again, we start the Summer electric pressure cooking recipe contest.
Our objectives are to encourage recipe sharing and make it fun and practical to cook with electric pressure cookers. Please spread the word!
The rules of the contest.
The recipes must be for electric pressure cooker, published on publicly accessible websites. If you don’t have a blog or a place to publish, we can put them on InstantPot.com recipe section.
Two prizes of Instant Pot IP-LUX60 will be awarded. Free shipping to continental US (excluding Hawaii & Alaska) and Canada.
The participant needs to give the right to publish one of their recipes on InstantPot.com.
The winning entries must be original and will be judged by
the details of description, a picture helps tremendously.
the practicality, and
the creativity
The winners will be chosen by Instant Pot staff on Sept. 30, 2012.
In his fascinating blog, Dave Arnold, Director of Culinary Technology at The International Culinary Center, detailed an amazing discovery in making flavourful soup stocks.
What’s the discovery?
“All pressure cookers aren’t created equal. The cooker you use affects flavor.”
Dave and his team of chefs and interns repeatedly tried cooking chicken stocks in two types of pressure cooker and conventional pot, did double blind testing with their eyes closed to factor out the hint of color as an indication to flavour.
To make the long story short, they concluded:
Stove-top pressure cookers with a jiggler type regulator (which makes a continuous chu-chu-chu-chu sound as it operates) make the worst stocks for leaking out flavour in the steam. They are worse than the conventional stock pot.
Pressure cookers with spring valve regulator, which allows you to turn down heating to prevent steam leaking, make the most flavourful stocks.
Simply put, escaping steam affects taste.
I’m not sure whether the professional chefs are interested in testing home kitchen oriented Instant Pot. But I’m rest assured that Instant Pot virtually leaks no steam during operation. And you don’t need to stand by to turn down the heat. For most of us, cooking is not a job or profession.
Our customers ask whether electric pressure cooker is slower than stove-top pressure cooker. Someone claimed that stove-top cooker can be 2~3 times faster in reaching working pressure. This may be possible with a gas-stove. However the majority of North American families use electric stoves. We decide to run a test on this typical scenario.
Test equipments:
Instant Pot IP LUX60 at the heating stage
Instant Pot IP-LUX60: 1000W, 6L inner pot. Plugged-into an electronic power meter (Kill-A-Watt P4400).
T-Fal Safe 2 on Maytag electric range
T-Fal Safe 2 Model 3271 stove-top pressure cooker, 6L capacity, which likely has a pressure rating of 11psi.
Maytag SuperCapacity Plus electric range with glass ceramic cooktop, coil element power rating: 2100W
Fill both Instant Pot and T-Fal with 3 liter tap water at 13.6°C
Set to cook at full pressure for 10 minutes. The “Manual” mode of Instant Pot was used.
After running multiple tests, the following is the results:
Instant Pot IP-LUX60 took 23:30 ~ 24:15 (minutes:seconds) to reach working pressure 11.6psi. Hold pressure for 10 minutes. Total power consumption 0.35~0.36 KWH.
T-Fal on Maytag electric range took 24:05~24:50 to reach pressure (steam release started leaking steam and rotating). Afterwards, power was turned down to 30% to maintain the pressure. Total power consumption based on the power rating: 0.945~0.974 KWH.
In conclusion,
The stove-top T-Fal + Maytag electric range take about 20~30 seconds longer to reach working pressure than Instant Pot IP-LUX60.
Instant Pot IP-LUX60 uses around 63% less electricity than the T-Fal in this specific test.
There are two possible explanations regarding the electricity consumption:
The glass ceramic cooktop reduces heating efficiency. The whole stove was warm and the T-Fal radiated heat along the way. That’s where the energy had gone.
Curved 3-ply bottom of Instant Pot stainless steel cooking pot
Instant Pot has two layers of air insulation, which minimize energy leakage. The bottom of its inner pot is curved inwards which fits tightly on the heating element curved outwards. Thermal conduction is excellent.
When we first designed Instant Pot, the intention is to make it fast in terms of convenience. A press-a-button set-and-forget smart cooker is our objective. Now heating efficiency makes Instant Pot faster than stove-tops on an electric range.
In our popular Winter Electric Pressure Cooker Recipe Contest, we realized how much fun it was to interact with our users. Most importantly, the submitted recipes substantially enhance everybody’s cooking experience. In the spirit of sharing, we start this Spring Recipe Contest and will award two Instant Pot IP-LUX60 to the winners.
To help everybody visualizing the cooking result of the recipe, please attach pictures of the dish.
The rules of the contest.
The recipes must be for electric pressure cooker, published on publicly accessible websites. If you don’t have a blog or a place to publish, we can put them on InstantPot.com recipe section.
Two prizes of Instant Pot IP-LUX60 will be awarded. Free shipping to continental US (excluding Hawaii & Alaska) and Canada.
The participant needs to give the right to publish one of their recipes on InstantPot.com.
The winning entries must be original and will be judged by
the details of description,
the practicality, and
the creativity
The winners will be chosen by Instant Pot staff on June 30, 2012.
There were 43 submissions with 50+ recipes for the contest. Wow! The user base of electric pressure cooker is surprising strong and enthusiastic!
Thank you all for participating. It’s joyful interacting with you.
Meanwhile, it’s very difficult to choose the winners. We had debats and come up with the list based on our criteria set out on the contest terms, i.e. details of description, practicality and creativity. A little confession to make. Our staff are apparently leaning toward recipes with pictures attached. Pictures are one key part of the description and they make the recipe enticing.
Kellie F.: “NOT Julia Child’s Beef Bourguignon“. The recipe reflects the value and advantages of electric pressure cookers. A complicated dish with complex tastes can be made within 45 minutes.
Maomao Mom: “Sous Vide Duck Breast“. This is the most creative use of Instant Pot. It brings us to a modernist’s kitchen. Besides this one, her other recipes are very creative and full of imaginations. Have a look at her other recipes http://maomaomom.com/recipes-in-english/
Congratulations to the winners of the 2012 Winter contest. We’ll contact you in email for shipping detail. To all participants, by continuing sharing, we will all end up as winners.
At Instant Pot Company, we also learned something beyond recipes.
Teresa G. said: “This is like a great cookbook!”
Indeed, we’d love to make InstantPot.com a great cookbook useful to all users. We shall continue encouraging sharing of recipes. The contest must go on. Every season, we’ll award 2 free Instant Pot to two authors of recipes submitted during the period. Please keep your recipes coming.
Sautéing is a method of cooking food with a small amount of oil or fat at relatively high heat. Food that is sautéed is browned while preserving its texture, moisture and flavor. A typical use of sautéing is to brown the meat before pressure cooking.
The new Instant Pot IP-LUX60 is equipped with an advanced sautéing/browning function key. 3 levels of temperature can be chosen with the “Adjust” key for best results.
“Normal”: ~160°C (320°F) for regular browning,
“More”: ~170°C (338°F) for darker browning, and
“Less”: ~105°C (221°F) for light browning.
The “Sauté” function can also be used to thicken the sauce after pressure cooking, by adding starch or simply evaporating liquid. In fact, it can be used for anything related with a sauce pan, e.g warming a canned soup, reheating porridge, etc.
During sautéing, the lid needs to be opened at all time to avoid pressure building up. If the lid is closed, the display will show a flashing “Lid”.
The procedure of using “Sauté”.
Press the “Sauté” function key.
Select a temperature with the “Adjust” key for “Normal”, “More” or “Less”.
When Instant Pot reaches the given working temperature, it displays “Hot” and you can start sautéing/browning meat.
One full “Sauté” session will run for 30 minutes. You can cancel it at any time by pressing the “Cancel/Keep Warm” key and continue with a pressure cooking function.
A brief video demo of Instant Pot IP-LUX60 for browning (sautéing) in action.
Owning to its convenience, dependability and kitchen friendliness, programmable electric pressure cookers are catching on the life style of North Americans in recent years. However, relevant published recipes are hard to find. Thanks to the suggestion from Charles T, we are going to hold a recipe contest. Winners will receive a free Instant Pot IP-LUX60. If all the users can share their recipe creations, this will be beneficial to everybody.
The rules of the contest.
The recipes must be for electric pressure cooker, published on publicly accessible websites. If you don’t have a blog or a place to publish, we can put them on InstantPot.com recipe section.
Three prizes of Instant Pot IP-LUX60 will be awarded. Free shipping to continental US (excluding Hawaii & Alaska) and Canada.
The participant needs to give the right to publish one of their recipes on InstantPot.com.
The winning entries must be original and will be judged by
the details of description,
the practicality, and
the creativity
The winners will be chosen by Instant Pot staff on March 30, 2012.
The hardware design of Instant Pot has matured for many years. Millions of electric pressure cookers of the same design are in use worldwide. However, our design team have been working on improvement to safety and performance for the last 6 months. I’d like to mention two most notable hardware enhancements.
Safety First
InstantPot new power connector design
The original power cable connector has a flat surface, see image on right. Liquid could drip from the lid or water collector along the cooker housing wall into the connector, which could become a power short-circuit hazard. Although none of such incident happened, our design team added a shield to redirect water away from the connector. This shield protect the power connector from any spilling water. See the new design in the picture on right.
Better Steam Release
InstantPot new steam release with silicone rubber cone, see the red circle.
The original steam release has a metal cone inside to seal over the steam release pipe on the lid. Metal on metal doesn’t always create a tight seal. There were reports of steam constantly leaking from the steam release. Although the defect rate is very low, at about 0.6%, our design team believed that they can resolve the problem once for all. The solution is to use a silicone rubber cone in the steam release. The silicone rubber cone creates a tight seal over the steam release pipe. This design was shipped with the last container load of Instant Pot IP-CSG60 and we haven’t had any report of leaky steam release.
After a runaway success of our model IP-CSG60/50, we have been looking for design ideas for our new models. Our source of inspiration came from user feedback. In general, the vast majority of our customers approves of our design philosophy of “Safe, Convenient and Dependable”. Instant Pot is about “set and forget” cooking style, leveraging the micro-processor controlled smart cooking programs.
Summarizing the user feedback, we found two areas which need improvement or enhancement.
Convenient and intuitive user interface.
Versatility of cooking capabilities.
We have taken these two points to heart and implemented them in the design of our new model IP-LUX60/50. This blog covers how the user interface is improved. I’ll talk about how the versatility is enhanced in my next blog.
We have a confession to make. The most support calls we received are questions about the flashing dashes and the marquee symbol (for pre-heating) in IP-CSG60/50. We decided to use plain English on the display to make the status display intuitive. Due to the limitation of the LED display panel, it’s a small challenge to find the right words.
Now in our new model IP-LUX60/50, the followings are used.
Preheating in Progress
Cooker is Not in any Cooking Mode
Warning: Need to Close or Open Lid to Continue
Keep Warm & Time In “Hour:Minute”. “L” Indicates Low Temperature
Sauté Temperature Reached
Delay Timer Selection & Display
Another improvement to usability is to allow manual changes to all preset cooking time. Simply, press and hold “+” or “-” to race the number to your desired cooking time. Note this doesn’t apply to the fully automated “Rice” and “Multigrain” programs.
Our users told us that you want more capabilities from Instant Pot, especially the browning and slow cooking. You may ask how “slow cooking” is compatible with the brand name of “Instant Pot”.
When our design started over 3 years ago, the intent was to create a smart cooking appliance so that cooking process to a user is “instant”, i.e. the press of a button. Of course, being a pressure cooker Instant Pot also speeds up cooking substantially.
To enhance Instant Pot’s versatility in cooking capabilities, we added Sauté/browning with 3 different temperature settings, ranging 105~170° C (221-338°F). You can use “Adjust” button to choose “Less” for low temperature, “More” for high temperature (close to olive oil smoking point) and “Normal” in between. Sauté is done with the lid opened. This function can also be used to thicken the sauce after cooking.
Following the same line of reasoning, we added 3 temperature settings for “Slow Cook”, ranging 88-99°C (190-210°F), again adjustable with “Adjust” button. These correspond to low, normal and high temperature cooking in common slow cookers.
We also extended manual cooking time to 120 minutes to cook tough dry food, e.g. split corns, in one cooking cycle.
Comments (1) 
Meanwhile, here’s the start of our Spring Recipe contest. Please share your home cooking creativity and spread the word about our contest!
Laura Pazzaglia is the creator of the popular 
In “Modernist Cuisine” (so far the most comprehensive and authentic book on the art and science of cooking), Nathan Myhrvold states that sealed cooking pots trap most aromatic volatiles which make stocks more flavourful (Volume II, pages 292). We also blogged about the astonishing discovery by Dave Arnold at the International Culinary Center that
When Instant Pot reaches the given working temperature, it displays “Hot” and you can start sautéing/browning meat.
