I love my Instantpot. I was kind of skeptical for a while. Mainly used it to cook jasmine rice (which it is excellent at) but the past few months I’ve really been branching out. A few weeks ago I cooked up some short ribs with mashed potatoes in under an hour. Tonight the menu was beef stew.
I don’t know about you, but when I start the work week, all my energy to make a full meal from scratch kind of drifts away from me. I have high hopes on Saturday and Sunday but by Monday or Tuesday I’m completely over it. I set myself up for success this week by chopping all of my ingredients in advance so today all I had to do was sauté, deglaze and then walk away for 45 minutes. While it was pressure cooking away I got my exercise for the day in (a new years resolution I’m still sticking to).
Here’s what I prepped:
1lb beef (stewing meat, came pre-cubed)
Chopped 1 lb mushrooms
Diced 1 small yellow onion
Peeled and chopped 3 carrots
Chopped 2 stalks of celery
Quartered 7 fingerling potatoes
Finely chopped 3 cloves of garlic
1/2 tbs fresh thyme removed from stem
Other non prepped ingredients:8 cups beef broth
1 tbs tomato paste
1.5 cups barley
1 bay leaf
salt
pepper
1 tbs olive oil
1/4 cup red wine
First step turn on the Instantpot- set to sauté
Bring up to a nice hot temperature and add in your olive oil. Once this is nice and hot add in your beef and sear it on all sides. Be sure to generously salt and pepper your meat before tossing it in. After about 6 minutes all sides should be nicely browned. Remove the beef.
Keep the Instantpot going and throw in your mushrooms. Add a little salt and pepper as you cook them down a bit as well. Once they are browned, remove the mushrooms.
Add a touch more olive oil at this stage and then toss in your onions. Add salt and pepper again. Cook these until lightly browned and golden throughout, about 6 minutes. Then add in the carrots and celery and cook all that together for about another 5 minutes. Throw in your garlic, bay leaf and thyme. Sauté for about 30 seconds then add the wine to deglaze the bottom of the Instantpot. Make sure you get all of the brown bits off the bottom of the pot, otherwise you may trigger the burn setting on the Instantpot while it’s in pressure cooker mode. Once you have fully deglazed add in your beef broth, potatoes, barley and tomato paste. Be sure to dissolve all of the tomato paste into the broth, you may find it easier to add the paste to a small amount of stock and then add the rest of the broth in after. Add a touch more salt and pepper, then close up your Instantpot, set it to sealing and set it on high pressure for 15 minutes. If you are new to Instantpot you may not yet know, it takes a while to come up to pressure so 15 minutes is really more like 25 minutes in the scheme of things; but your “cook time” on the Instantpot should read 15. Once this counts down to 0, do a partial natural release. You’ll wait til the counter goes back up to 15 and then carefully release the rest of the steam from the Instantpot using the release valve.
Voila! Beef Stew. I’m freezing a large amount of mine for future lunches and dinners as winter continues. Hope you enjoy!