A delicious test drive of an impressive new kitchen tool: Instant Pot Short Ribs

Cooking beef short ribs in an Instant Pot greatly reduces cooking time and still delivers the delicious, tender goods. Recipe below.

WE’VE NEVER BEEN BIG ON RUSHING INTO THINGS. Last November, we finally got an Instant Pot. And this past weekend, I finally cooked with it. The first thing I cooked? Short ribs, of course.

We love cheap cuts. Chuck roasts, beef stew meat. Those flavor-filled, sinewy, fat-marbled cuts that only give up their chewy toughness when cooked long and low, usually in an oven, usually for three to four hours. My favorite of those cheap cuts is short ribs. When I was growing up, they were used mainly to flavor big pots of soup. The short ribs were why I soldiered through the vegetables in the soup. Partly, it was the wonderful meatiness. But at least partly, I think, it was the curious architecture of short ribs—big cubes of meat anchored with a flat slab of bone.

The shortcoming of short ribs is that three to four hours of cooking—and this is after whatever prep time you’ve invested. That makes them strictly weekend fare, specifically weekends when you’re able to be home to supervise the cooking.

Enter the Instant Pot. It sports a dazzling array of buttons and automates an impressive number of cooking processes. But at its heart, at least for us, it is a pressure cooker. A safe pressure cooker that doesn’t explode, coating your ceiling with whatever you were cooking. This was Marion’s childhood experience, on numerous occasions, with her mother’s pressure cooker adventures. It was a reason we resisted buying a pressure cooker—and ultimately, why we did buy an Instant Pot.

So how is cooking with it? This isn’t a review, by any means. It’s some experiences and observations I had using it exactly one time so far.

Timing. As many users will tell you, the Instant Pot is not instant. If you’re using the pressure cooker mode, it takes time for the Instant Pot to heat up and get to full pressure—five to 10 minutes. And after your food has cooked the set time, the pot has to depressurize, maybe 10 to 15 minutes. But the actual cooking time for these short ribs was 40 minutes. So compared to the three to four hours of oven time needed with a conventional Dutch oven, you’re looking at about an hour.

Cooking space. The stainless steel inner pot of the Instant Pot is more vertical than most Dutch ovens, but with a smaller cooking base; our 6-quart pot has an 8-inch diameter bottom. That definitely means browning large amounts of meats in batches. And for the short ribs, it meant cutting the three-boned pieces into individual segments.

Sautéing. Some recipes I’ve read for the Instant Pot suggest browning meats in a separate pan, then adding them to the pot for pressure cooking. I decided to see how the pot would handle this step. Short answer, just fine. There is no adjusting the sauté temperature—it’s either on or off, and it gets plenty warm. But make sure you have enough oil in the pan and you’ll be okay. This is not a nonstick pot. It behaves like other stainless—Let the meat sear properly and it will release. When sautéing your aromatics, again make sure there’s oil in the pot and stir frequently. And deglazing with a liquid works beautifully—there are actual browned bits and they do scrape up to flavor everything.

Releasing the pressure. There are various methods for this. I used the most straightforward one I found—when the pot shuts off at the end of cooking, let it sit undisturbed for 10 minutes. Then carefully, with an oven mitt, turn the steam release handle to open. It will hiss furiously for a bit, releasing scalding steam (keep your face away from it, no matter how good it smells). Then the float valve will drop down, signalling it has run out of steam, and you can safely open the pot.

Reducing the sauce. Okay, this time I did use a separate sauté pan—it’s much faster than having the Instant Pot’s sauté function get up to temperature again. With something fatty like short ribs, you’ll also want to lose some of the now-liquid fat. After removing the ribs, I used a grease separator, taking the stainless inner pot out of the cooker and slowly pouring its contents into the separator.

And the results? Wonderful. Flavorful and tender, in far less time than I could have achieved in one of our Dutch ovens. Oh, we won’t put those Dutch ovens in storage—there’s still something wonderful about filling the kitchen with seductively meaty, aromatic smells on a quiet weekend afternoon. But I can tell this Instant Pot is going to see plenty of action.

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Instant Pot Short Ribs

Cooking beef short ribs in an Instant Pot greatly reduces cooking time and still delivers the delicious, tender goods.

Course Main Course, Meat

Servings 4 with probable leftovers

Equipment

• Instant Pot

Ingredients

• 2 cups dry red wine
• 3 pounds bone-in short ribs, cut into individual segments
• salt and freshly ground pepper
• 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more if needed
• 1 medium-to-large yellow onion, chopped
• 3 to 4 large carrots, peeled and sliced on the diagonal
• 2 large cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves or 1 teaspoon dry thyme
• 2 sprigs rosemary
• 1 cup beef stock or broth, preferably unsalted
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• mashed potatoes for serving

Instructions

• Reduce the wine. Bring wine to a boil in a medium sauce pan over high heat. Reduce heat to medium and cook until wine is reduced by half, about 15 minutes. You want to end up with 1 cup of reduced wine—if you overdo the reduction, just add enough unreduced wine to bring it back to a cup. I learned this tip from Chef Daniel Boulud—he says it makes a sauce taste as if it has cooked for days. If you don't want to do this, just use 1 cup of unreduced wine when it's time to add it to the pot.
• Season short ribs with salt and pepper. Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in the Instant Pot, set on Sauté. Working in batches so you don't crowd them, brown short ribs on 2 sides. Two or three minutes per side will do—you don't need to char them, just let them release that flavor into the pot. Set ribs aside.
• Add onion and carrots to the pot, along with a little more oil, if needed. Season with salt and pepper, and cook, stirring frequently, for 2 to 3 minutes. Clear a space in the middle and add garlic and thyme. Cook until fragrant, stirring constantly, about 45 seconds. Add rosemary, beef stock and reduced wine to pot, and stir, scraping up any browned bits.
• Return ribs to the pot. You can cram them in pretty tight, but you still may need to put a couple on top of the rest. That's okay. Seal the lid of the Instant Pot and set to cook on high pressure for 40 minutes. When the cycle is done and the Instant Pot shuts off, let it sit for 10 minutes, then using an oven mitt, carefully turn the steam release handle. When the float valve drops down, remove the lid.
• Transfer the short ribs to a plate and tent with foil. Many of the bones will fall out—you can bid them farewell or salvage them to artfully reinsert them when you plate the ribs.
• An impressive layer of fat will float up to the surface of the sauce. Get rid of as much as you easily can—I used a grease separator. Transfer sauce, carrots and onion to a sauté pan. Discard the rosemary stems (the needles will have cooked off them) and bring sauce to a boil.
• Cook until sauce is reduced a bit, about 5 minutes. In a small bowl, stir corn starch into 1 tablespoon of cold tap water. Spoon a little sauce into the bowl to slightly warm it, then stir the corn starch mixture into the sauce. Cook for a minute or 2, stirring frequently, until sauce thickens. Add ribs to pan to warm them, cooking a minute or 2.
• Divide warm mashed potatoes among 4 plates, mashing down to create a base for the ribs. Set ribs on potatoes and spoon sauce, along with carrots and onion, over everything. Serve.