Today I’m going to make one of my favorite Instant Pot dishes:
Instant Pot Chicken Adobo
So far, I've made it every week during the COVID-19 shut down.
The instructions in that website are way better to follow when you’re actually preparing the dish, but I’ll give you a quick walk through of what I do, if you want to pretend like you’re making it :) I'm curious how it would turn out without an Instant Pot!
Prep:
First I like to prep all the dry ingredients that will be mixed in, only combining ingredients in bowls if they will be added at the same time. Since this recipe is SO easy, it's basically just cutting an onion and garlic.
Then I’ll prep the chicken.
The recipe calls for generously seasoning with salt and pepper, but I chose not to add any salt to the chicken because the sauce I have on hand already makes it too salty, especially the leftovers which may spend a couple of days marinating in the fridge! (I am using Tamari, which has less sodium than Soy Sauce, but I should have bought the reduced sodium kind! An even healthier alternative would be to use coconut aminos instead)
I like setting out all my ingredients, here are the ones I used
Cook:
1) Sauté
I found using tongs was the easiest for arranging the chicken. The first part is browning both sides of the chicken on sauté
Your chicken may end up looking like this
And your Pot may end up looking browned like this.
2) Pressure cook
After taking out the chicken, it's time to all the other ingredients to the pot, and scrape up all the bits left behind from the chicken. I’ve only done this in an Instant Pot, but I bet you could transfer everything to a separate pressure cooker :)
At this point, your pot might look like this:
Once you’re ready, tuck in all the chicken in a single layer on top of the onions — and don’t forget to top with the bay leaves!
While I wait the ~15 minutes (however long it takes to get to high pressure, and then the 10 minutes for it to pressure cook), I usually spend the time cleaning up the kitchen so there’s less to do afterward :) If you used a separate pot for sautéing, don’t clean that up quite yet!
3) Sauté
When you open it back up, it might look delicious already but it's not ready yet!
Next we want to sauté everything to thicken the sauce. If you are transferring to your sauté pot, maybe remove the bay leaves so you can add them back on top after the transfer. You’ll be letting it boil for 15 to 17 minutes.
While it thickens, prepare your rice or cauliflower rice. I usually make my cauliflower rice from frozen packages which requires zero effort. I usually just dump it into a pan and sauté on the stove for ~9 minutes.
And, if I have green onions handy, I’ll chop some up to top everything off!
4) Enjoy
Once it's done boiling, remove the bay leaves, and serve.
The cauliflower rice I used this time came with some red and green bell peppers mixed in it too, in case you spot some unbeknownst red and green splashes of color.
Voila! Absolutely delicious
