Winner, winner with this chicken dinner
The best Instant Pot cookbook? ‘Butter chicken lady’s’ Indian guide Butter chicken
I’m assuming you already have an Instant Pot, or why else would you be reading this? As I’ve written before, it’s an immensely useful device, worthy of your precious kitchen counter space. But you already knew that. What you want to know, and what you’ve badgered me about incessantly for months, is the best Instant Pot cookbook.
Until the device was introduced in 2010, there wasn’t such a thing as an Instant Pot cookbook. Pressure cooker cookbooks existed, and considering the device is primarily an electric pressure cooker, that was a pretty good start. But none explored the other functions of the device, including slow cooking, sauteing, rice cooking, yogurt-making and, lest we forget, keeping things warm. Honestly, until recently, you were better served online, where you could browse through Facebook groups and dedicated Instant Pot blogs.
Starting in the fall, that all changed, as Instant Pot cookbooks flooded the marketplace, each offering to be the only guide you needed for the shiny device. Not only that, but now there is a book for nearly every occasion, cuisine and diet. There are so many Instant Pot cookbooks promising to save you time in the kitchen, you’d need an uninterrupted week just to sort through them all.
For help, I looked for the most popular options on Amazon. They included such hits as “Instant Pot Obsession” by Janet A. Zimmerman and “The Instant Pot Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook” by Laurel Randolph. While the books might be fine for beginners, cooking times seemed off.
I had luck with a couple of recipes from Melissa Clark’s “Dinner in an Instant,” but I also noticed something other commenters had pointed out: There’s nothing instant about most of these recipes. The majority of them have long ingredient lists, call for multiple other appliances and take days to prepare.
“Multicooker Perfection” by America’s Test Kitchen is far more practical, offering both a collection of good recipes and exploring the many uses of the device. Did you know you can fry chicken wings in an Instant Pot? I tried it, and it works.
If you’re in need of a cookbook with obsessively tested recipes mixed with geeky guides to the unique features of the device, this is a safe bet.
But it’s not my favorite Instant Pot cookbook. That honor belongs to Urvashi Pitre’s “Indian Instant Pot Cookbook,” a beginner’s guide to Indian cuisine.
If the author’s last name doesn’t ring a bell, you may have heard of the “butter chicken lady,” the Facebook group star recently profiled by The New Yorker. It’s all thanks to her recipe for butter chicken that has been shared on her website 53,000 times.
I know why the dish went viral. That particular recipe, also known as murgh makhani, takes about 15 minutes of prep work and is ready to eat in less than a half-hour, yet it tastes wildly complex. Sharp fresh ginger and tickling cayenne jump out, while the haunting fragrance of garam masala waits in the background. It sounds aggressive, but it’s balanced by a blanket of creamy butter, which gives the dish its name.
You really get the feeling that each recipe was designed specifically with the Instant Pot in mind, instead of an older recipe being adapted to the new machine, because they always work. I know because I’ve tried nearly a dozen of them, and they have all been astonishingly easy and dramatically flavored. The Punjabi chicken curry and lamb rogan josh require about the same effort as setting up a slow cooker stew, yet taste vibrant and alluring.
When you have great cookbooks like this one, it’s hard to see how the Instant Pot craze will slow down anytime soon. Total time: Manual: Saute: Prep: Nutrition information per serving: