5-Ingredient Instant Pot Cookbook: 150 Easy, Quick & Delicious Meals

by Marilyn Haugen

Dinner is about to get even easier now that you can cook mouth-watering meals in your Instant Pot(R) with five ingredients or less.

The Instant Pot(R) is unquestionably the most popular and bestselling kitchen appliance of the last year, with many models performing the functions of a pressure cooker, a slow cooker, a rice cooker, a steamer, a saut� pan, a yogurt maker and a warmer. 5-Ingredient Instant Pot(R) Cookbook is a perfect companion for the Instant Pot(R) and a follow-up to Marilyn Haugen's previous bestseller, 175 Best Instant Pot(R) Recipes, which has over 20,000 copies in print.

All of its 150 recipes, created especially for use with an Instant Pot(R), contain a minimum of ingredients and require little effort. There are recipes for every occasion and season, and for novices and well-seasoned home cooks alike. The recipes include favorites like Ham and Cheddar Egg Muffins, Hearty Black Bean Soup, Pepperoncini Beef Roast, Chicken Caesar Pita Pockets, Braised Herb Salmon with Asparagus, Buttery Garlic Mashed Potatoes, and Chocolate Peanut Clusters.

Genres: Cookbooks

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 2018

Reviews

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

The point of the book is the tool - instant pot and the 5 ingredients. It fulfills both those.
Good ideas, good options. Some are silly, like the shrimp and grits - you make the grits, then have to clean the pot and cook the shrimp. I get it, only 1 tool in the books vs being in a kitchen.

I found a good handful that i really thought would be a good addition to my own collection of recipes!

[Aprilleigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

The great appeal of this book is the simplicity of the recipes - only 5(ish) ingredients! It's also one of its biggest limitations. For ingredients, salt, pepper, oil, butter, water, and broth/stock don't count, so some (most) of these recipes have more than five ingredients. That's probably a good thing, because that's a pretty strict limit for ingredients and would likely lead to a lot of very bland recipes. Optional ingredients don't seem to count either, and I suppose that's fair.

Because of the limitations of this book there aren't a lot of one-pot dinners among the recipes, although there are some (beef stew, a variety of simple chilis, some vegetarian dishes, and a few odds and ends). The variety of main courses, side dishes, and desserts is pretty impressive, and there are some intriguing breakfast options I haven't seen before. Most of the basics, which tend to have a limited number of ingredients, are here.

Each recipe includes servings and a list of the Instant Pot functions you'll use (mostly sauté and pressure cook, but several recipes have alternative directions to slow cook and there's a basic yogurt recipe). Most recipes contain a tips section, and some include variations and/or serving suggestions. There's no nutrition information at all. There's an eight-page section at the end of the book with handy tables of cooking times for a variety of foods (meats, seafood, legumes, grains, vegetables, and fruits).

There are very few photographs, and those are collected in two small groups to keep printing costs down. It was an unfortunate choice given the $20 price tag and the large number of Instant Pot cookbooks of the same size or larger selling for less that didn't skimp on these details.

Overall I'd say the book has merit due to the simplicity of the recipes, but the price tag on top of the limitations imposed by that simplicity (nothing really unique in here, just simpler versions of things you can find in numerous other Instant Pot cookbooks) make it one to pass on for me.