One of the first recipes to try in a brand-new pressure cooker is a pressure cooker pot roast recipe. Recipes such as this are super simple and require little to no pressure cooking experience to master, especially if you cook it in an electric pressure cooker.
Electric pressure cookers and multi-cookers provide preset cook settings to make the process of pressure cooking, easy.
And even if you have a significant amount of cooking experience, it always helps to have a pressure cooker for saving time in the kitchen. In general, pressure cookers allow for better multitasking and cook foods more evenly than other conventional stovetop and oven methods.
This Pressure Cooker Pot Roast recipe is easy to follow, but feel free to add extra seasonings and different vegetables to make the meal more complimentary to your taste buds.
Pressure Cooker Pot Roast
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Total cooking time: 1 hour and 15 minutes
Ingredients
2 tsp corn starch (to make gravy)
Instant Pot Duo Plus
Cooking Instructions
Step 1:
Place the chuck roast pieces and sea salt in a large bowl. Add your choice of seasoning blend, then mix thoroughly with your hands until evenly coated. Remember to wash your hands first.
Step 2:
Use the “sauté” setting on the pressure cooker to heat the olive oil and pieces of chuck roast. Let it sear for about 5 minutes. If your pressure cooker does not have a “sauté” setting, sear the oil and roast in a pan on the stove before transferring to the pressure cooker.
Step 3:
Add the carrots, baby red potatoes, and beef broth to the pressure cooker, then set it to high pressure using the manual setting. Once the pressure cooker reaches the correct pressure, set the timer to 45 minutes.
Step 4:
After the time is up, let the pressure release naturally from the cooker for 10 minutes before using the quick-release pressure valve to allow the remaining pressure to escape. Be careful while removing the contents of the pot since it will be very hot.
Gravy Instructions
To make the gravy, start by removing only the beef and vegetables at the end of the cooking instructions, and use the leftover juice with the following Gravy Instructions. Alternatively, you can substitute a different gravy made separately, but this is the fastest way to whip up a tasty pot of gravy to serve on top of the roast.
Step 1:
In a small bowl, mix the cornstarch with a small amount of water. Stir continuously and continue adding water until the mixture is smooth and not clumpy.
Step 2:
Add the cornstarch/water mixture to the pressure cooker and stir it to ensure the combination with the leftover broth from cooking.
Step 3:
Set the cooker to “simmer” and continue to stir until it thickens into a gravy. To test, take a spoon to raise some of the gravy out of the cooker; if it has a thick stream from the spoon and is not too runny, then it is ready.
Cuisinart Electric Pressure Cooker
Helpful Tips for This Recipe
Instead of adding carrots and baby red potatoes to the pot roast, feel free to substitute them for any other vegetable. Just make sure the vegetables added are raw and not pre-cooked. Otherwise, the vegetables will become mushy in the pot by the end of pressure cooking. Fresh, chopped vegetables are the best for this recipe.
Here are some suggestions for vegetables and other ingredients that could act as substitutions for the carrots or potatoes:
How the Manual Setting Works on a Pressure Cooker
Most electric pressure cookers have numerous cook settings, but they also have a “manual” setting, which allows the person using the pressure cooker to set a specific time and level of pressure.
For using a stovetop pressure cooker, there is no need to worry about these settings; use it as you typically would.
Electric pressure cookers, like the Instant Pot Duo Plus and the Cuisinart Electric Pressure Cooker, may seem confusing at first, but with recipes like this Pressure Cooker Pot Roast recipe, you will see that they are simple.
Recipes that instruct the use of the manual setting will say to use either low or high pressure and an amount of time to enter on the timer.
For example, a recipe suggests cooking the food at high pressure for 15 minutes. To do this, follow these steps:
- Plug in and turn on the pressure cooker
- Add the ingredients from the recipe and press “manual”
- Select “High Pressure” and use the up and down arrows until the timer is at the correct time
- Look for an indicator light that informs you that it is starting (not all pressure cookers have this)
- Be aware that there is a buffer time in-between when you select the settings and when the timer starts since the pressure cooker needs time to warm up and reach the correct level of pressure
Some of these steps can change with different brands and models of pressure cookers.
When in doubt, reference the instruction manual that came with the pressure cooker or look up a tutorial online that could help.
Conclusion
Pressure cookers make cooking easy, so follow the instructions as best as you can and try not to make things too complicated because it will only reduce the amount of time saved by using the pressure cooker.
For the best results with this recipe, always use freshly cut vegetables and organic or locally butchered roast beef. Store-bought ingredients are not bad, but food always tastes better when it comes straight from the source.
It would help if you also considered investing in one of the newer pressure cookers available this year, or in recent years since they have the easiest instructions and cook settings.