SPEEDY BIRD!
A Thanksgiving turkey for eight — in one hour? It sounds nuts, but if you own an Instant Pot, the trendy kitchen gadget du jour, it’ s totally do able
ROASTING a turkey used to mean hours of pacing and peering into the oven. But thanks to a trendy kitchen gadget, home cooks can now make a beautiful brown bird in a mere hour.
“It’s definitely 100 percent possible,” food blogger Jeffrey Eisner tells The Post. The 38-year-old Astoria resident, who runs a recipe blog called Pressure Luck Cooking, is on a mission to prove that you can make an entire turkey — as well as stuffing and gravy — in an Instant Pot, the superspeedy electric multicooker that’s dominated American kitchens over the past two years.
“It’s a new way of cooking,” says Eisner of the pumped-up pressure cooker. “When you have an appliance like this that can do it all, why not push the limits to see if it can make a turkey?”
To that end, he’s spent the past few weeks toting the inner lining of his Instant Pot around his supermarket’s frozen turkey section, to demonstrate how smaller birds — in the 7- to 9 ½-pound range — nestle neatly into the pot.
Although Eisner cooks with a large 8-quart Instant Pot Duo Crisp + Air Fryer, the smaller 6-quart model should also work as long as the bird fits.
“It’s OK” if your turkey “pokes up above the [pot] a little bit,” he says, as long as you can “press it down” when the bird thaws. To be safe, he says you should bring your pot to the store, like he did, to confirm that your turkey is the right size.
For his great Thanksgiving experiment, Eisner went with a 9-pound turkey, which serves about eight people. It would take around 3 hours to roast in an oven (a little longer if you stuff it), but in Eisner’s Instant Pot, it was done — stuffing and all — in 50 minutes. He says a smaller bird could cook in as little as 40 minutes.
Despite the short cook time, if you do it right, “it