Not in love with my Instant Pot

[Goodheart]

Aside from the blatant lies about cooking times, and the blind SURPRISES you get, I find the menu system really confusing and unintuitive.

For example, I just tried to cook some plain white rice... put the hard rice in with the appopriate amount of water, closed it up, and pressed the "Rice" button. Sure sounds simple enough, right? But then the LED flashed 12:00 minutes... OK, I can deal with that... it's going to take 12 minutes once the pot is pressurized.... BUT THEN...

The led changes its display word to AUTO and a panel button marked "Keep Warm" lights up..... well short of the pressure time + 12 minutes. It's certainly not cooked, so why is it "Keeping my stuff Warm"? What sort of nonsense is that?

Either I have a defective pot or somebody needs to go back to the drawing board. With this much guess work I might as just use a regular pressure cooker.

[Phoenix61]

1. Auto indicates it is getting up to temp and

pressure. When it gets there the timer will start counting.

[Goodheart]

2. LOL

My, that's so OBVIOUS!

/sarcasm

Thanks for the info, though.

[MissB]

3. Shame!

Kidding.

Anyway. Use 1 cup rice (dry measuring cups) and 1 cup water (wet measuring cups) plus just a tad bit of your favorite oil. I use canola. Just a tad- maybe 1/2 tsp or so. Just drop a small glug in there.

Close it up, turn the knob to seal. Hit manual, adjust the time to 6 minutes. Walk away because you don’t need to touch anything else.

Once it’s done, wait until the cycle ends and the display reads L012 (so let it go for 12 minutes of rest time after the cycle ends.) Release any remaining pressure using your left hand and open it up. Should be perfect.

I never use the presets unless I’m making yogurt. The rest of the time, I just use manual.

I highly recommend the Facebook instant pot page. It’s a gem full of advice, tips, amazing recipes and some nice innovations.

[Goodheart]

5. Hit manual? Why am I hitting the manual? I thought this was supposed to be simple.

[MissB]

6. The manual button. I think the newer versions say pressure cook

instead of manual. I have a version 1.

[Goodheart]

7. Oh. I don't have a "manual" button... mine says "Pressure cook".

Thanks for the advice.

The paper manual that came with this pot, by the way, is not worth the paper it's printed on. LOL

[MissB]

8. True!

I never even looked at it.

If you’re into black beans, I throw them in dry, cover with water and throw in a bay leaf. Pressure cook for 32 minutes then let the pressure release naturally (let the pin drop on its own.)

Rinse then use.

Magical if, like me, work and plan for dinner at the last moment.

[Thekaspervote]

4. My son in law has one..he's the chef. His sits in the cupboard a lot. Glad I didn't invest

[MuseRider]

9. I love mine but yes I agree with you, it took me a while.

I wrecked a couple of things until I figured out. Mine is not an Instant Pot. It is an off brand but the same couple of problems right at first. I do not use it all the time but when I do I am very happy with the results. I have not mastered rice or pasta in it, it is always wrong but I will keep trying.

I do agree that it is a little bit hard to figure out at first.

[peacefreak2.0]

10. Still on a learning curve with mine.

Enough success (country style ribs) to have me try more things. Still trying to figure out how to make pasta that's not too soft😄

[abqtommy]

11. I used to prepare rice in a rice cooker. You put the rice and amount of water called for

in the cooker and fire it up. It was ready in about 5 minutes. It was a low-tech cooker, no led display, just perfect rice!