When I saw the cover of Richa Hingle’s new Instant Pot cookbook, one phrase jumped out: “With new techniques, including pot-in-pot!”
Pot-in-pot? I had an inkling of what that might mean, but just to be sure, I flipped to the pertinent chapter, and sure enough: Hingle, a.k.a. Vegan Richa, included instructions and six example recipes for a technique whereby you cook two or even three parts of a meal simultaneously, using an extra bowl and/or rack to stack the elements. (She also sprinkles other pot-in-pot recipes throughout the rest of the book.)
I was immediately sold on the possibility. After all, the Instant Pot’s greatest gift to home kitchens isn’t the speed; it’s the hands-off cooking. Multiply the number of dishes you can make this way at once, and the efficiency can’t be beat.
Hingle, 43, was an early adopter of the IP because she has long known how useful pressure cooking is for two of the biggest staples of her homeland’s cuisine: legumes and grains. When she was growing up in central India, her mother had several stovetop pressure cookers that she used daily, and Hingle is no different. Even though she loves the Instant Pot, “I still have five pressure cookers in the house,” she told me in a Zoom call from her home in Seattle.
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Just as pressure cooking itself is nothing new, neither is the pot-in-pot technique. Hingle’s mother often cooked multiple elements — daal and rice, for example — in stacked fashion inside her stovetop pots.
Today, the Instant Pot has made pressure cooking so much more accessible, and Hingle hopes it will do the same for a technique that she thinks more people need to embrace.
Her book deals with plenty of straightforward Instant Pot techniques, too: The 150 recipes include plenty rooted in Indian traditions, from mushroom masala and vegetable biryani to rajma masala and malai kofta. She devotes an entire chapter to dals, lentils, beans and peas. But she also delves into other global cuisines, with a Cajun-style red beans and rice, West African-inspired peanut stew, and a jackfruit crunch wrap with vegan queso.
If you’re ready for more, try one of the pot-in-pot recipes, such as a mushroom Bourguignon over a potato-cauliflower-mash, Ethiopian lentils over spiced cabbage, or these grits topped with a mushroom-chickpea stew.
Don’t assume you’ll need to order special equipment. When I made the grits and stew, I used the long-handled steaming rack/trivet that came with my 6-quart Instant Pot, along with a deep 4-cup stainless steel bowl and some foil. (Make sure you use a bowl that not only fits inside the pot, but also leaves you enough room to grab it when it’s time to come out.)
In the bottom went the stew ingredients, and the rack fit perfectly on top. The grits ingredients went in the bowl, and the two cooked together for 15 minutes (plus the time to come to pressure and the time for the pressure to naturally release).
Out came one bowl and then the other, and all it took was a little whisking and a little more vegan butter to make the grits smooth, a creamy base for the wine-infused stew on top.
This is next-level Instant Pot cookery — literally.
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