Joy of cooking ‘Under Pressure’
Ashley Singh Thomas salutes the Instant Pot in her cookbook
My Heart Beets blogger, Ashley Singh Thomas, is an Instant Pothead big time.
TheShadyside resident used to own three Instant Pots and is down to two, 6-quart ones, after giving one to her brother — but plans to move back to three when a new model comes out or when she buys the 8-quart Ultra.
She is the founder of the Instant Pot for Indian Food group on Facebook, which has 72,429 followers, in addition to being among the 1.2 million members of the Instant Pot Community group on the social media platform. She proselytizes the electric pressure cooker’s benefits to anyone and everyone who will listen and has convinced
her mother, mother-in-law, brother and many of her friends to own one. And she has a self-published cookbook, “Indian Food Under Pressure,” in its honor.
“I think I should be on Instant Pot’s payroll considering how much I advertise it,” Ms. Thomas says, laughing.
“Under Pressure,” which is available on Amazon for $20.66 and on Kindle, focuses on North and South Indian cuisines — particularly Punjabi (which is what she grew up eating) and foods from the state of Kerala along the southeast coast (which is where her husband’s family has its roots). After starting with a giant wish list of all the recipes she wanted to feature, she settled on 60 and adapted them to be Instant Pot friendly. “Some of them can be found on restaurant menus, but some you come across only when you eat at someone’s house,” she says.
Divided into chapters such as rice & dal (lentils) and chicken & eggs, the book caters to different diets, including vegan and vegetarian. Each recipe is accompanied with photographs taken by Ms. Thomas and the directions are clearly explained in steps. Staples in an Indian pantry are translated into layman’s terms.
Ms. Thomas gives advice “on things to know before you start cooking,” spells out the advantages of cooking Indian with an electric pressure cooker and offers menu suggestions. For brunch, the southern Indian steamed rice cake (idli) and crepe (dosa) come together with spiced chickpeas (chana masala) and saffron fruit and nut rice (meethe chawal) that are from the northern part of the country. A fancy dinner party menu features tomato- and yogurtbased corn soup along with chicken biryani, dal makhani made with whole and split lentils, potato and eggplant in pickling spices and a cardamom rice pudding. A weeknight menu is far simpler with spiced ground meat with rice (keema pulao), yellow lentils with spinach, and cabbage tossed with peas.
Even though the recipes in her book are all cooked in the Instant Pot, Ms. Thomas stays clear of the two words from the title of the book to the end, and every chapter in between. “It’s a trademark word and when I spoke to the company about it, Instant Pot wanted me to pay a royalty to use its name,” she says. “This is a self-published book and I didn’t think I had the ability to handle it.”
But that didn’t deter her from writing about the advantages of the appliance, which she uses daily, and sometimes multiple times of the day.
You don’t have to babysit the cooker, she writes, “you just plug it in, press a button and let it do the rest.” That’s especially helpful, she says, when it comes to juggling time between taking care of her 17-month-old son, blogging and testing recipes. She finds that the cooker helps in “containing the smell” of ginger, garlic and onion when they are cooked with spices and at the same time makes the food more flavorful. And she loves that she can place the steel insert from the cooker into the dishwasher, which is something she “can’t do with most of her pots and pans.” She also leans on it for its consistent results, “It is reliable and leaves less room for human error,” Ms. Thomas says.
Last month, Instant Pot posted on its Facebook page that one of its products, Gem 65 8-in-1, could overheat and some parts potentially melt. So it asked customers to stop using the multicooker and recalled it last week. But that does not faze Ms. Thomas or her opinion about the company. “I do not own a Gem and it has nothing to do with the electric pressure cooker,” she says.
In fact, she practically cooks everything in her “pots” although Instant Pot cautions about using it for cooking split peas, oatmeal, noodles and applesauce (”they may foam, froth or sputter and can clog the steam release valve,” Instant Pot says). Although she does heed the advice not to deepfry anything in it, she recently used it to shallow-fry bitter melon in a quartercup of oil.
Between creating recipes and regularly blogging about them on “My Heart Beets”; offering advice to people with food or diet restrictions be it vegan, paleo or keto; and her first cookbook (an ebook) “South Asian Persuasion,” one would assume that Ms. Thomas was born with a ladle in her mouth and lived her life in the kitchen. But that’s not how or why she became a food fanatic. She found her calling for cooking only after she graduated from the University of Virginia and around the time she got married.
“My mom and dad cooked for me all the way through college,” she says. “So I never had a need to cook, at least Indian food.”
When she worked as a news reporter and fill-in-anchor at the Fox station in York, Pa., she used to call her mom all the time to make basic foods, she says. She would shadow her parents and later her in-laws, when she got married and moved to Morgantown, W. Va., to make “proper Indian food.” Having picked up some techniques, she started blogging about food “after work just for fun.”
But that was then. A hobby turned into a full-time career. Today, she is the one giving her parents and inlaws tips and recipes and she has gone beyond just recreating traditional classics such as gulab jamun (fried milk-dough balls in sugar syrup) and moved on to creating desserts such as the two-ingredient Indian “cheesecake” — made with condensed milk and yogurt.
With “Under Pressure,” Ms. Thomas says she wants to get people excited about Indian cuisine using an appliance that has a cult following. “I have often been told that Indian cooking is very time consuming,” she says. “I want to make Indian food accessible and the Instant Pot helps me do that.”
Even if her “pot” doesn’t bring waves of nostalgia of a pot simmering with soup or can’t grill steak or bake crisp and chewy cookies, she’s sworn to being an Instant Pothead forever — for all the otherthings it can do.