Get More From Your Multicooker With These 5 Cookbooks
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Multicookers, especially those made by Instant Pot, have become major fixtures in our kitchens in the last several years. Also known as electric pressure cookers, they took their move from the stovetop to the countertop as an excuse for an image makeover.
No longer perceived as the rattling explosion hazards our grandmothers placed over their gas burners, the new versions are quiet and easy to use, with the ability to ratchet down the start-to-finish time enough to make a complex weekend-style meal possible on a school night. They make comfort food—stew, chili, mac and cheese, beans, risotto—and transform tough cuts of meat into deep-flavored, silky-textured marvels.
Yet it's important to note that multicookers and slow cookers are kissing cousins, doing the same work on different schedules. For some, it might be easier to put together a meal in the slow cooker in the morning before work and return to lovely aromas at the end of the day. Others can turn on the pressure and jam out an Instant Pot dinner in one go shortly after walking in the door.
Multicookers' enduring popularity has led to a spate of books that help the home cook get the most out of their device. These are my favorites, thanks to their well-tested recipes, packed with flavor.
Be sure to read our other cookbook recommendations, as well as our gift guide for home chefs and our reviews of multicookers and other smart kitchen gadgets.
Indian Instant Pot: Traditional Indian Dishes Made Easy & Fast
There's a reason Urvashi Pitre is known as the “butter chicken lady” among her fans. Her recipe for murgh makhani is fantastic, and as long as your spice drawer is well stocked, her recipes are surprisingly easy to make. Pitre's goal with this book is to pare sometimes-complicated Indian recipes down to their essentials, streamlining the ingredients and techniques. Her food retains authentic flavors but stays within the cook-it-on-a-weeknight realm. It's an infectious and empowering philosophy, and cooking one thing leads to cooking the next more often than in other books. On one productive afternoon not too long ago, before I knew it, I had a tableful of baingan bharta (eggplant with onions), palak paneer, a pair of masalas, and lovely leftovers for days.
Madhur Jaffrey's Instantly Indian Cookbook: Modern and Classic Recipes for the Instant Pot
One of India's best-known cookbook authors is the logical next step after Pitre. Madhur Jaffrey likes getting technical—for example, cooking chili powder, paprika, turmeric, garlic, ginger, and other spices together with a bit of water on low pressure to get the flavors to marry. When that’s done, the lid comes off, and the shrimp and coconut milk go in, and everything’s heated with the saute function until the crustaceans are just cooked through. Pressure-cooker rice can be a revelation, too, and she gets specific with her basmati, combining the Instant Pot's rice setting with 10 minutes of “keep warm” time before releasing the pressure.
Her version of murgh makhani calls for almost twice as many ingredients as Pitre's, plus an overnight marinade, all worth it. The pressure cooker is a fantastic way to hard-boil eggs, rendering them surprisingly easy to peel, and my favorite dish in the book is her Hyderabadi hard-boiled eggs in a garlicky red sauce with tamarind, mustard seeds, curry leaves, fenugreek, and nigella, all perfect over that exemplary rice.
The Chef and the Slow Cooker
Read enough slow-cooker and multicooker cookbooks and you begin seeing recurring recipes, as if pork shoulder, mac and cheese, turkey chili, and five other kinds of chili were all part of an unspoken framework without which the whole genre would collapse. Hugh Acheson prays at a different altar. His calm and humorous voice is a treat, and his slow-cooker cookbook tells you he spends time thinking about flavor, and in doing so, turns the whole category upside down.
In just a few pages in the “vegetable-focused” section, The Chef features tomato confît, chickpea and eggplant stew, butter braised cabbage, and braised shiitakes with tofu, all quietly rearranging what you think you can do in your Crockpot. Sticking this book in among the multicooker books isn't as subversive as it sounds; intrepid pressure-cooker people can figure out how to adapt many of these recipes to a multicooker. Or just take his advice, cook everything in a slow cooker or using your multicooker's slow-cook mode, and take a long walk while dinner happens for you.
Multicooker Perfection: Cook It Fast or Cook It Slow—You Decide
America's Test Kitchen has always held a special place in my heart, thanks to their relentless recipe testing. That ethic carries over into Multicooker Perfection. Whether you're new to pressure cooking or an old pro, you can rest easy knowing its recipes are rock solid. The book’s ragù alla Bolognese features ground beef, pork, and veal but gets incredible depth from blended chicken livers, which are stirred in as soon as the lid comes off, cooking in the pot's residual heat. It's a stunner, taking advantage of the medium to reach a higher plane.
Dinner in an Instant: 75 Modern Recipes for Your Pressure Cooker, Multicooker + Instant Pot
The cover of Melissa Clark’s book features a photo of her tamarind baby back ribs with star anise, lime, soy, and ginger. While it’s there for a reason, I also come back to the book over and over for basics like soft-boiled eggs (five minutes low pressure, manual release, ice bath) and smart modernizations on classics like risotto with wild mushroom, pancetta, and peas. If you’d rather take your time preparing Clark's lamb tagine with apricots and olives by letting the dish stew slowly all day instead of throwing it together in a mad rush before dinner, she is particularly good at highlighting the option to “cook it slow.” On many of the recipes, Clark explains how to adjust the ingredients to make things work perfectly in a slow cooker, or even the slow-cook setting on your multicooker.
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