Meat & Poultry Instant Pot Recipes

[Instant Pot] Insta-Chicken! Pressure Cooker Chicken Breast

Original publish date July 10, 2015. Updated 2023 with expanded information.

It’s true: with Instant Pot, chicken breasts can magically transform into the world’s most effortless healthy dinner! This is the ultimate guide to pressure cooking chicken breasts. I have cooked many, many chicken breasts in the 8 years that I’ve been using my electric pressure cooker – frozen and fresh, from extra-large to tiny tenderloins, and everything in between.

Let your Instant Pot make it easier than ever to turn chicken into a healthy meal prep staple. Fuel up with lean protein that the whole family will enjoy – paleo, keto and gluten-free eaters included.

[Instant Pot] Chicken Spaghetti

Instant Pot Chicken Spaghetti! This recipe is flat-out the quickest way to whip up a weeknight dinner version of the familiar favorite southern casserole dish.

This one-pot meal for your pressure cooker is creamy, cheesy, comfort food – and made from simple, wholesome ingredients too!

[Instant Pot] Jerk Chicken

Homestyle Jamaican jerk chicken: make it faster and easier than ever with your pressure cooker!

This is the BEST jerk chicken because the flavor is built from all fresh, healthy ingredients – hot peppers, ginger, garlic, fresh herbs and spices – and like magic, Instant Pot gets those flavors SO deeply infused into the tender, juicy chicken.

[Instant Pot] Picadillo: Cuban Style Ground Beef

Picadillo! A Latin American classic, and a sublimely simple dinner to whip up with your Instant Pot. In a pressure cooker, you can achieve slow-cooked flavor in a fraction of the time. It only takes a pack of ground meat, a few chopped veggies, and a couple of basic pantry staple seasonings to fix up a meal that satisfies my chronic cravings for Cuban food.

What is picadillo? Through the lens of American cuisine, you could think of it as a sort of chili, stew or hash… But simply, it’s a dish of ground meat sauteed with onions, peppers and seasonings. Different cooks make it all kinds of different ways, but I’ll walk you through my personal favorite take – inspired by the Cuban-style recipes I’ve become addicted to, thanks to the years I lived in Miami.

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Korean Sesame Beef + Zoodles

Double Decker Dinner is a personal favorite Instant Pot recipe theme, all about finding the right combination of foods that pair together as a balanced meal and that can be stacked and cooked at the same time in the same pressure cooker. It’s one-pot wonderful!

Using your Instant Pot to cook zucchini noodles is handy. It’s even handier when you can cook everything you need to round out a balanced meal all at the same time!

These zoodles resemble classic Korean japchae noodles, dressed up with a spicy-sweet sauce, ground beef, extra veggies and a flourish of toasty sesame seeds.

[Instant Pot] Saucy Chicken Tinga

Tinga de pollo! In Mexican cuisine, this means shredded chicken, braised in a sauce made with chipotle chilies, tomato and onion. It’s savory, spicy, smoky, and deliciously saucy. It makes incredible tacos, and this year I used it as the star filling in one of my family’s favorite festive holiday traditions: our annual Tamale Party, fueled by Instant Pot!

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Thai Coconut Beef Curry + Brown Jasmine Rice

It’s been a minute, amigos! It turns out that mothering an infant is kind of time-consuming… Who knew? 😉

I’ve always appreciated efficiency in the kitchen – but now that I’m a mom, shortcuts are serious business! My signature Double Decker Dinners continue to prove their worth, and today’s stackable recipe is particularly peppered with some rather satisfying shortcuts.

This dead-simple coconut curry makes appearances in my Instant Pot when I feel like Thai food but don’t feel like take-out. I can’t claim authenticity, but I can affirm that it hits the spot and does it quickly!

[Instant Pot] Insta-Spaghetti!

This recipe is one of my go-to lazy-cook dinners – especially helpful right now while I’ve been learning how to manage dinnertime with a newborn baby in the house! My back-pocket beef & veggie bolognese is lovingly known as “insta-spaghetti”, and while it’s not the same as your all-day ‘Sunday Sauce’ fancy bolognese affair, it is a filling, nourishing, very easy comfort food dish. The recipe combines grass-fed ground beef, lots of chopped mixed vegetables, canned tomatoes and whole-wheat pasta – all in one pressure cooker.

[Instant Pot] Freezer Meals: 5 Favorite Make-Ahead Healthy Dinner Recipes

As I waddled through the third trimester of my first pregnancy, my attention turned toward strategies for make-ahead meal prep and easy-cooking plans to keep myself well-fed this winter when my life turned happily upside-down!

That’s right… the time has come for us to dish about Instant Pot Freezer Meals! As part of my post-partum food prep strategy, I embarked on a little project to store a lineup of five of my favorite freezer-friendly pressure cooker dinners. Today I’m here to share what I’ve learned along the way – and all of the recipes too, of course!

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Coffee Pot Roast + Butternut Mash

I’ve been told that my grandmother cooked a famously aromatic pot roast made with coffee. Unfortunately nobody knows the recipe, so I imagined how I would like it to taste. Deeply savory, slightly bitter but countered with natural sweetness from onions, enhanced with thyme and bay leaf, and finished with a touch of syrupy acidity from aged balsamic vinegar. I gave it a shot, and it was love at first bite. Now, I am here to make sure nobody loses this recipe!

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Cheesy Taco-Stuffed Peppers + Quinoa

It’s Double Decker Dinner Time! My favorite kind of one-pot wonderful balanced meal – there’s just something so satisfying about stacking and cooking two foods in one Instant Pot.

This easy recipe begins by using Instant Pot to saute a mix of seasoned grass-fed ground beef taco meat with chopped veggies. We stuff as much as we can into split bell peppers, arranged on a steamer basket – and whatever doesn’t fit is left in the pot and joined by a cup of quinoa. Both layers cook together in just one minute pressure-cooking time!

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Linguine + Clams

Friends, I’m here to report a new discovery in the field of Instant Pot Double-Decker Dinners. This idea felt ridiculous – but it added up on paper, I couldn’t let it go, and it turned out to be true: we can cook linguine and clams at the same time in the same pressure cooker. It’s an Instant Pot Miracle. ✨

Layer 1 is dry pasta immersed in a buttery white wine sauce. Layer 2 is a basket of fresh clams, steamed over top, at once being flavored by the sauce below and also adding their own briny goods to the mix. After pressure-cooking together for just 4 minutes, we finish with fresh herbs and lemon juice and astonishment that a one-pot meal can seriously look like this.

[Instant Pot] Insta-Broth! The Art & Science of Pressure Cooker Bone Broth

A good broth is a beautiful thing – a magical culinary elixir that extracts the hidden goodness from bones and other kitchen scraps… Food that would otherwise go to waste, but that still has deep flavor and powerful nourishment to offer.

Broth is an ancient food. It’s been around as long as people have boiling food in water. Long-simmered stocks made from vegetables, meats and bones have a history of recognition for not only their culinary value, but also their nutritive merits. Humans have a long tradition of strengthening weak constitutions with broth, from its use by early nutritionists as an inexpensive protein-sparing diet staple for the malnourished, to everyone’s favorite cold remedy – chicken soup.

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Chicken Marsala + Parmesan Polenta

Today, we make a long overdue return to Double-Decker Dinners! This pressure-cooker recipe theme is all about finding the right combination of foods that compliment each other to round out a satisfying meal, and also happen to harmoniously take the same amount of time to cook together in my Instant Pot. This challenge never fails to pique my culinary imagination, so stay tuned – more experiments are in the works.

[Instant Pot] Korean BBQ Beef Roast + Ssam

I was never really exposed to Korean food growing up in Florida, but I learned to LOVE it after moving to San Diego. I lived and worked near the Convoy district, the city’s great wonderland of pan-Asian cuisine, and that’s where Korean barbecue stole my heart. Sweet, salty, garlicky, fragrant with toasted sesame oil, utterly addictive – especially when devoured ssam-style, in lettuce wraps piled with rice and lots of kimchi.

[Instant Pot] Double Decker Coq Au Vin + Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Bonjour, my friends. To begin this month’s pressure-cooking extravaganza (Insta-Pot-tober??), let’s kick off with something special: it’s French, it’s fancy, and it’s a double-decker one-pot wonder:

Layer 1 is the classic French braise featuring chicken, bacon, wine, vegetables & mushrooms: coq au vin. (ooh la la!)

Layer 2 is a basket full of quartered potatoes and whole garlic cloves, which happen to steam to mashable perfection in the same pressure-cooking time as your main course. (sacre bleu!!)

See category: Double Decker Dinners!

[Instant Pot] Ropa Vieja: Cuban Shredded Beef Stew

Ropa vieja. Be still, my heart.

While I was studying to become a dietitian, I lived in Miami for three years. Moving to Miami can cause some serious culture shock, even for a Florida native, but I have to admit that crazy town has some perks.

Some of the best perks were getting to know Cuban friends and their Cuban FOOD. In Miami, I met some of the world’s nicest people who got me very well acquainted with Cuba’s rich culinary traditions. Cafecitos. Maduros. Picadillo. Pastelitos. And one of my personal favorites, ropa vieja, a classic comfort food that makes you feel at home whether you grew up eating it or not. It’s a flavorful stew made with peppers, tomatoes, and flank steak cooked low-and-slow until the meat is tender enough to effortlessly pull apart into long shreds that resemble the fibers of threadbare cloth, hence the name (ropa vieja = old clothes).