Think a pressure cooker is just for meat? Think again. Here are dozens of vegetarian Instant Pot recipes to prove you wrong.
Alex and I eat a mostly vegetarian and plant based diet. (In fact, we wrote a book about it!) When we heard about the Instant Pot, we figured it was just for meat: and didn’t give it a second thought. It wasn’t until a friend shared with us that she cooked sweet potatoes in her Instant Pot that we started to reconsider. Fast forward until today, and we’ve made dozens of vegetarian Instant Pot recipes! The sky’s the limit: from basics like rice and quinoa, to soups and even pastas!
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And one of our favorite ways to use an Instant Pot is to cook dried beans. You can cook up a pot in 1 hour. It’s a drastic time savings versus the stovetop method (which calls for starting to soak the beans the night before and takes hours on the stove).
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Here we’re sharing all of our best vegetarian Instant Pot recipes! Ready to get started?
Best vegetarian Instant Pot recipes
What Instant Pot do you use?
For all of these vegetarian recipes,Alex and I use an Instant Pot brand Instant Pot (Instant Pot is the brand name; Instapot is a slang variation). The Instant Pot we use is the Instant Pot DUO60 6 Qt 7-in-1 Multi-Use Programmable Pressure Cooker. We have used that Instant Pot to test all of the Instant Pot recipes on this website. There is definitely variations between pressure cooker brands and sizes, so you may see some variation in cook time.
Understanding Instant Pot cook time
When you look at cook time with any pressure cooker, you’ll need to factor in a few more things than just the actual cook time. Keep the following in mind:
- “Preheat” time: Once you add the ingredients to the pot, the pressure cooker requires about 5 to 10 minutes for come up to pressure. This time can vary depending on the recipe.
- Natural release: Some recipes call for a Quick Release: here you’ll immediately release the pressure and open the lid. But some recipes call for a Natural Release method, where you wait with the cover on after the cook time for the pressure to naturally release from the pot.
Cleaning the Instant Pot
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The plastic sealing rink inside the Instant Pot can pick up odors when you use the pot to cook vegetarian recipes. To remove the smell from an Instant Pot sealing ring, soak it in vinegar for a few hours. Another option is purchasing two sealing rings. We have 2 Instant Pot sealing rings and use one for savory recipes and one for sweet recipes.
A good practice is to store the Instant Pot with the lid upside down so the sealing ring is exposed to air, instead of with the lid closed onto the pot. This allows the sealing ring to air out between uses.
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Last updated: January 2021
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