Instant Pot Rice
Updated:
I’ve been very perplexed about how to cook rice in an instant pot. Every blog and recipe I’ve stumbled upon has said they were able to cook rice perfectly in this machine.
It turns out that I’ve been bamboozled and made the rookie’s mistake of confusing between mass and volume measurements.
Common Instant Pot Recipe
The water to rice ratio that commonly touted is 1:1. I mistakenly assumed that these would be like baker’s percentages and by mass.
But nope, the Instant Pot rice recipe is actually a ratio by volume: 1 cup of water for 1 cup of rice.
Ratios By Weight or Volume
Ratios by mass is very common in the baking world. Recently there has been a trend of providing recipes with mass measurements. If you don’t, you lose credibility as a source for recipe and baking success. Sites such as King Arthur Flour and Serious Eats provide masses for all their recipes.
This fervour for measuring by weight is even worse in the bread baking world. They literally only talk about baker’s percentages. i.e. “70% hydration, 1 kg loaf, etc”.
Cooking Vs. Baking
In the cooking world, volume is commonly used because precision is not that critical. Not many cookbooks communicate using ratios: see the prevalence of recipes that state “1 large onion” as an ingredient. We can agree that this is highly subject, varying anywhere from 1-3 cups. Factors affecting this are the types of onion used, the produce available in your region, and correspondingly the same for the recipe author.
Corrected Instant Pot Recipe
One cup of rice is 185 g but one cup of water is 240 g. When calculated to a ratio by weight, this is 1:1.3.
130 g of water for every 100 g of rice
Tweaking
This is a good starting point but you’ll need to tweak this for every batch of rice you purchase. There are many factors that affect why differing amounts of water is required:
- Some rice varieties absorb more. Basmati supposedly requires more water
- Different brands and batches may be differently aged.
- Like dried beans, the older they are, the more water they’ll probably need.
- Different regions farming the same crop can have differing humidity or drying practices
- Where you live could change the ambient humidity and moisture that dry rice reaches in equilibrium
Anecdotally, I’ve cooked jasmine rice with 140% and it turned out wonderfully. I would even push it further to 150%.
Cooking Time
I typically cook rice in the Instant Pot using the pot-in-pot method, as I cook <3 servings at a time. The cooking times need to be extended to 10 minutes.
I think it takes longer because pot-in-pot cooking method has less water in the pot, which is less mass to bring up to temp. It takes <5 minutes to reach pressure from a cold start. If I were to measure total cooking time, I wonder if it’s the same cumulative time spent at temp.