Try this One Pot Pasta recipe, or contribute your own.
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 tsp dried basil
- 1 tsp dried oregano
- 1 medium onion (diced)
- 1 tsp fennel
- 1 lb italian sausage or any other ground meat
- 16 ounces pasta (any type)
- 1 green pepper (diced)
- 2-3 cloves garlic (minced)
- 2 tsp sugar (optional to cut tartness in tomato sauce)
- 28 ounces crushed tomatoes (1 can )
- 28 ounces water or chicken broth
- Carbohydrate 1.20315124858935 g
- Cholesterol 0 mg
- Fat 3.50898500127292 g
- Fiber 0.767687489795777 g
- Protein 0.233064999759403 g
- Saturated Fat 0.494300000157289 g
- Serving Size 1 1 recipe (2502g)
- Sodium 25.21159940108 mg
- Sugar 0.435463758793572 g
- Trans Fat 0.119753000001736 g
- Calories 35 calories
Step-by-step
- Press Sauté to turn Instant Pot on and begin heating it up.
- If meat is lean, drizzle olive oil in bottom of heating pot.
- Brown italian sausage (or other ground meat, if using) in pot.
- To make the spaghetti sauce, add basil, oregano, and fennel to browning meat.
- Stir in onions and bell peppers, and saute for 2-3 minutes. Add garlic and stir in for 1 minute.
- Pour in crushed tomatoes.
- Add 28 ounces with fresh water or chicken broth and pour into IP (Instant Pot) over the sauce and meat.
- Stir this all together, and try to push as much pasta down into the sauce as possible.
- Place lid on Instant Pot and lock it in place.
- Check to make sure valve is on Sealing.
- Press to turn machine off from sautéing meat.
- Press Manual or Pressure Cook and then or to adjust time to HALF of lowest minutes of cooking time indicated on the box of pasta.
- Wait 10 seconds. Pot will beep to let you know it is starting to heat up. It should take approximately 12-15 minutes to come to pressure. The number of minutes that were entered will appear on the screen and begin to count down to zero.
- Carefully, keeping face and hands away from the valve, move it to Venting. This is a Quick Release. Should food begin to spray out, simply close the valve and wait a couple of minutes.
- After it is cooked, stir well and taste test. Be careful! It is extremely hot immediately after you release the pot. If you find it tastes too tart, sprinkle in 1-2 teaspoons of sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatoes.
Crushed tomatoes drive the chemical environment of this dish, providing both the free water necessary to hydrate the starch and the acidic pH that slows gelatinization. Starch molecules swell and absorb liquid proportionally to the surrounding volume under pressure. When scaling this recipe up or down, the ratio of dry pasta to cooking liquid must remain strictly one-to-one by weight or volume. Pressure cookers require a minimum amount of free liquid to generate steam, typically one cup of thin liquid for small units and two cups for six-quart models. Exceeding the maximum fill line of the inner pot by more than two-thirds risks blocking the pressure release valve with expanding starch foam.
- Double the meat and aromatics safely without increasing the liquid beyond the equal volume of the pasta.
- Brown the meat thoroughly at high heat to develop Maillard compounds before adding the high-moisture vegetables.
- Set the pressure cook time to exactly half the lowest minute value printed on the dry pasta packaging.
- Perform a manual quick release immediately when the timer sounds to prevent the internal residual heat from over-softening the pasta.
Overcooking remains the single greatest pitfall when pressure cooking starches, turning the noodles to mush within seconds. Adjust the sugar at the very end of cooking to balance tomato acidity without scorching the bottom of the vessel during the pressure cycle.
