Instant Pot vs. classic: Which tastes best?
Pernil asado, coq au vin and black bean soup were all prepared and compared
“Oh, gosh. Oh, jeez.”
Jude, my Instant Pot customer service representative, was flustered. I had called to ask — as anyone might — if it was OK to light cognac on fire in my Instant Pot. After a brief hold and a few nervous giggles, Jude gave me the go-ahead: No more than 15 to 20 seconds, ma’am, keep the lid off and remove the pot from its base. No problem, Jude.
Popular though Instant Pots are — Amazon sold enough during the holidays for 9 million bowls of chili — they provoke a lot of questions. One of mine (pyrotechnics aside) was: We know they’re fast, but can they make my favourite dishes taste as good as traditional cooking?
I decided to put three recipes I love head to head, cooking them simultaneously in an Instant Pot and in a Dutch oven: coq au vin (chicken cooked in wine), pernil asado (Puerto Rican pork roast) and a black bean soup.
The Instant Pot is an electric multifunction pressure cooker, one of many on the market, and its charms include a searing setting. I’ve owned mine for a few months and have gone from scoffing newbie to evangelist. Pressure cookers work, but to paraphrase George Michael, you gotta have faith.
For my test, I hewed as closely as possible to the traditional recipe, only adjusting when I thought it was necessary (such as volume of broth), doing research to make sure I was on track.
As you get accustomed to using your electric pressure cooker, you’ll get better at adapting your favourite recipes. (When I was in doubt about timing, I looked to Melissa Clark’s excellent cookbook Dinner in an Instant.) My Staub 5 1⁄2- quart Dutch oven went head-to-head with the 6-quart Instant Pot DUO60. Since part of the appeal of each method is that you can do the steps easily in one pot, saving yourself a skillet to wash, I did so.
I also invited Allison Plumer, coowner and chef de cuisine of Brooklyn restaurant Lot 2, to taste every dish blind with me. I’m a fan of Plumer’s food — crisp carnitas, great burgers — and trust her palate.
Here are our verdicts: Pernil asado I’ve made this recipe a dozen times in my Dutch oven, and I love it: all garlic, fresh herbs and tons of bright citrus. Pernil is a classic Puerto Rican roast that takes hours to cook in the oven, but it results in falling-apart meat. I marinated both 4-pound roasts for 16 hours. The traditional roast cooked for 4 1⁄ hours, whereas
2 the Instant Pot version — cut into four hunks, with the bone removed but thrown in — took half that time.
I flipped and basted the Dutch oven roast as I went along, and was pleased with the result: shellacked, dark-brown skin and tender meat. In the Instant Pot, however, everything melted into a meaty, fatty mess. I plucked out the meat using tongs, simmered the sauce for 5 minutes, and was able to skim off a tablespoon or two of fat.
There were no crisp squares of skin to pluck off the top, while I cackled with glee, when it was done. I was disappointed: It was as though the shoulder had gone straight from marinade to leftovers, skipping the beautiful presentation part. But the meat was tender and very flavourful. Winner: Traditional
Plumer immediately identified the Dutch oven roast. “God, I really prefer that for textural purposes only,” she said. “That is outstanding.” Coq au vin Surprisingly, both approaches required equal time: 2 hours and 5 minutes, which included breaking down the chickens and executing Julia Child’s old-school techniques such as boiling, then blanching lardons: You could skip both steps and save time. Cooking the bird in the traditional pot takes a little longer, but the Instant Pot requires more time for searing (12 minutes) and bringing to pressure (12 minutes) before cooking (for 13), releasing steam (2 minutes), and simmering when the sauce is done (5 minutes).
Coq au vin gets its signature glossy sheen when you whisk in a butter- flour roux called beurre manie that gives it a silky texture. This disappeared easily in the stovetop sauce but not so well in the Instant Pot. Also, I was able to get a much crisper chicken skin searing it in my Dutch oven. (As Clark wrote, “The Instant Pot doesn’t do crisp or crunchy. So don’t ask it to and you won’t be disappointed.”) Winner: Traditional Julia would have been proud. The Staub sauce was “so delicious and perfectly emulsified,” said Plumer, whereas the IP version was thin. Black bean soup The Instant Pot shines when it comes to beans, since it eliminates traditional cooking and soaking times. For this test, the traditional approach took 17 hours (including rather a too-long soak; it could have “only” been 10 hours), whereas the Instant Pot required merely 2 1⁄2, all told. (Preheating the IP took 11 minutes, cooking took 50 — I like very soft, luxe beans, so I added 5 minutes of high pressure in two intervals — and the “natural release” of steam recommended in my research took a full 20 minutes.) Winner: Traditional This time, the same recipe produced two wildly different dishes. The Dutch oven reduced the volume of the broth by three-quarters, and what a broth! With a booming, concentrated flavour, delicate aromatics and acid from the long-simmered red pepper, it was a delight. As for the Instant Pot soup, “Everything in this bowl,” Plumer said, frowning, “tastes like black beans.” Whereas the traditional version had a broth with gorgeous flavours, this was more like a chili, black in hue and wanting sour cream, lime juice, salt and heat. The final assessment Having tasted what the Instant Pot can and can’t do, would Plumer recommend buying one?
She would, “but to a working professional who doesn’t have two hours to devote to cooking dinner every night.”
She said that her restaurant, which generally offers the same menu, maintains a routine “because it’s easy.” The same applies to the busy home cook. A pressure cooker allows you to make short ribs on a Wednesday night, she said, and how great is that?
(Plumer also allowed herself to get a little moony about what the machine could potentially do for beef stew, in which a uniform flavour and melting textures are the goal.)
Its drawbacks? “It lacks the ability to finesse your dish.”
So much about cooking is being able to monitor as something cooks, whether it’s skimming fat off soup, basting a roast or salting beans as you go. The Instant Pot removes the option.
“But if you’re cooking for the family,” Plumer added, “chances are your partner isn’t going to be, like, ‘Hey, you didn’t salt all the way!’ ”
And she admitted that she was impressed by the flavours of the pernil.