Breakfast tacos — in an instant
Grabbing a quick breakfast taco at our favorite taquería to start the day is very much part of Texas culture.
And there’s a reason we often let someone else do the cooking: carne guisada, refried beans and other favorite tortilla fillers take serious time to prepare. Heck, even the professionals relegate barbacoa and its half-day cooking time to just the weekends.
Fortunately, home cooks have an ally in the Instant Pot. This week we’ve adapted four breakfast staples to the Instant Pot: barbacoa, carne guisada, picadillo and refried beans. Cooked back to back in a single pot, all were prepared in less than four hours in a home kitchen.
The insanely popular digital pressure cooker has become a staple in kitchens across the globe — the device’s Facebook community has more than 2.5 million followers — and can be used to slash hours to minutes when breakfast is on the line.
The Instant Pot does force some compromises. For starters, a couple of extra minutes of cooking can reduce delicate ingredients to mush. Our picadillo recipe is a pretty exact 8 minutes under pressure, and if that pressure isn’t released when the timer goes off, there’s a good chance the potatoes we include will be reduced to paste.
Barbacoa is another big trade-off. Traditional barbacoa may roast for hours in an underground pit. There’s no replicating that longsmoked flavor in an Instant Pot, and it’s impossible to stuff a whole cow’s head into a 6-quart pressure cooker. Fortunately, most area grocery stores stock beef cheeks, which we used in our recipe.
But by and large, all of our recipes this week delivered the big and bold flavors Texas loves, and made those labor-intensive dishes a breeze, and there are advantages beyond time here. The Instant Pot is a fairly contained unit that doesn’t splatter grease on the counters while sautéeing or dribble overflowing liquid onto stove burners — a common experience for anyone who’s simmered a pot of beans before. And because everything happens in one pot, there are inherently less dishes to wash afterward as well.