Vasanti Bhadkamkar-Balan - Authentic Indian Cooking with Your Instant Pot: Classic and Innovative Recipes for the Home Cook

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My Happy Family

I have known Vasanti for a long time, and even though we havent met in person (yet), we have always managed to connect through our love for food. She believes that cooking is not a daily task but a daily fun activity. She has shared her passion through her cooking classes, and now she is doing the same through her cookbook.

Through this cookbook, she makes Indian cooking accessible to everyone. What I like the most about this book is that it is not limited to common Indian dishes. It includes classic and traditional dishes from all across India! There are fusion recipes, family favorites and a few special ones from her Maharashtrian heritageand everything is prepared in the Instant Pot.

Every recipe has a photo of the dish, which is very important for someone like me who wants to visualize the dish even before I prep it.

The book is useful for both vegetarians and meat lovers. There is a huge array of dishes, including some .

Vasanti has made sure that the book includes a mix of dishes that are perfect for busy weekdays as well as elaborate ones that are great for weekends spent cooking with family and friends.

Kankana Saxena, author of Taste of Eastern India and creator of Playful Cooking

Like many other Indians, I landed in the United States back in 2001 with a pressure cooker packed in my luggage. It was small but heavy, and I had to leave a few things behind so that I could fit it in the suitcase. My nifty pressure cooker stuck with me throughout grad school, and then after I got married, it continued to help me in the kitchen as I explored the world of home cooking with guidance from my mom. Fast-forward to 2015: My husband decided that I should ditch my pressure cooker and upgrade to this new kitchen gadget called the Instant Pot. I was not ready to part with my reliable and trustworthy kitchen BFF but decided to keep an open mind and give the Instant Pot a chance. Little did I know that it would one day lead me to write my very first cookbook!

My cooking journey began long before the invention of the Instant Pot, with my blog Signature Concoctions. I launched it in August 2008 to document my adventures in the kitchen as a novice home cook. To get better at developing recipesas well as food styling and photographyI underwent formal training at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. Since then, I have been using the skills I learned during my training to reinvent Indian classics and retrofit old family recipes and share them, along with mouthwatering photos, on my blog.

The Instant Pot has proven to be a game changer for Indian cooking. It transforms some of the traditional elaborate Indian recipes like chicken tikka masala or chicken biryani into weeknight winsand an added bonus is that theres only one pot to clean! As I worked on this book, I felt like I was unlocking the full potential of the Instant Pot, using all of its functionalities while stretching my imagination and challenging my creativity. I enjoyed coming up with some of my most innovative signature concoctions, like and many more.

This book is my humble effort to make Indian cooking accessible to anyone. Get ready to travel all over India and taste traditional dishes like Kashmiri and many more, all made in the Instant Pot. Most of these recipes are usually elaborate and require hours of simmering on the stove, but with the Instant Pot, theyre done in half the time! Since the Instant Pot uses pressure to cook, meats dont need hours to marinate. Instead, you can let meats marinate on the counter while you prep the rest of the recipe, and then you can dump them in the pot after a little sauting. Once the ingredients are all in the pot, you can walk away while the Instant Pot gets cracking, making authentic Indian curries faster than you can get takeout. And, unlike the oven, you dont need to wait for the Instant Pot to preheat.

section. Most of the recipes in this book include suggestions for variations to accommodate dietary restrictions or just a change of pace, stretching the number of possible dishes beyond whats listed in the table of contents. If youre a newbie when it comes to cooking Indian food or using the Instant Pot, just make each recipe by following the directions as specified. Once you get the hang of it, though, I hope you will use this book not just for the recipes but also for the techniques to cook Indian food with the Instant Pot, and that you will have fun creating your own signature concoctions!

Happy cooking,

Before you get started, here are a few tips and tricks for making the most of your Instant Pot:

There are quite a few versions of the appliance available on the market, and not all of them have the same buttons. If your appliance does not have the button specified in a particular recipe (e.g., Poultry), you can use the most common button, Manual/Pressure Cook, and adjust the time and the pressure settings to those specified in the recipe.

You can cook rice together with the various recipes using the pot-in-pot method. All you need is a tall trivet and an Instant Pot stackable insert pan. For white rice varieties like basmati, Ambemohar, Ponni and Sona Masuri to serve on the side, use a 1-to-1 ratio of rice and water or stock. For brown basmati rice or quinoa, use a 1-to-1 ratio of rice and water or stock.

Use the Saut function to cook out excess moisture and thicken the consistency of a sauce.

Although the ring is washable and even dishwasher safe, it retains food odors and can impart them to the next dish that is cooked in the Instant Pot. Its best to have two separate rings, one for stews and curries and another for desserts.

For tough food or hard-water stains, use a hard surface cleanser like Bar Keepers Friend (available on Amazon) to clean the inner pot and make it look brand-new!

My husband is a meat lover and cannot go without it for more than a day, so its safe to say Ive had a lot of practice preparing everything from chicken to beef and from pork to lamb. I enjoy the process of creating new recipes and have included some of my favorites in this chapter, like .