Instant Pot Brown Rice

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Today we’re sharing an Instant Pot brown rice recipe. It’s super simple, but sometimes simple recipes are the best recipes. We’ll tell you what we love about Instant Pot rice and tell you why we prefer Instant Pot rice over stove top rice and even over rice cooked in our rice cooker.

Instant Pot Brown Rice - Instant Pot Rice is the best way to make rice!

Our 8 year old daughter gets really excited over a plain bowl of white rice. Our 5 year old loves it too, but prefers it with butter on top. And for all things butter related, she asks for a “great deal of butter” ala Mercy Watson (one of her favorite audiobooks) or a “large pool” on top. My wife and I love rice as well and so a batch of white rice or brown rice or this turmeric rice is often the base for some of our meals. We love to add rice to our Thai Butternut Squash Soup. We usually make Vegan Butternut Squash Soup with wild rice. The popularity of rice in our house cannot be ignored.

The popularity of rice, of course, goes well beyond our house. In fact, according to wikipedia, rice, “as a cereal grain“, “is the most widely consumed staple food for a large part of the world’s human population, especially in Asia”. That’s a whole lot of rice consumption!

Instant Pot Brown Rice

As with all things that are made a lot, eventually preferred cooking methods emerge. And for us, Instant Pot rice is a clear winner! We made stove top rice for years and we have a rice cooker which we use and enjoy (we use this and the Instant Pot simultaneously when making multiple batches of rice), but our new preferred method is Instant Pot rice.

The Instant Pot is the new trend in home cooking. It’s a multi-cooker that is capable of doing many jobs. It’s a pressure cooker, a slow cooker, a yogurt maker, a rice cooker, a saute pan and a warming pot all rolled into one. So it’s sort of like of a traditional pressure cooker and crock pot got together and had a baby that has super powers. 🙂

We gave in to the trend several months ago and this Instant Pot brown rice recipe has become a favorite. Instant Pot rice is the way to go!

Other Easy Instant Pot Recipes

Advantages of Instant Pot Rice

Food cooks faster in a pressure cooker compared to other methods.
Rice doesn’t have to be immersed in water and so it better retains flavor.
Set it and forget it. You don’t have to watch it constantly like you would if you were cooking on a stove top.
Food cooks at an even higher temperature so you’re even more likely to kill any harmful micro-organisms in the food.

source: http://instantpot.com/technology/benefits-of-pressure-cooking/

When cooking rice for family dinners, we usually make a large batch of white rice in the rice cooker along side Instant Pot brown rice. They both take about the same amount of time (if we made brown rice in the rice cooker it takes much longer). This way we have both types of rice and large amounts if prepping ahead–you can even freeze rice and easily reheat later.

So all in all, we find we love making Instant Pot Brown Rice and Instant Pot Rice of all sorts. It’s just easy. It’s hard to mess up. And it takes less time than other cooking methods.

When we’ve cooked brown rice in the Instant Pot, we usually use brown basmati rice. In general, you should use a 1 cup rice to 1.25 cups of water because cooking in the Instant Pot will need less water than the directions on the package. Feel free to add in other spices or seasonings. We frequently make our brown rice like our cilantro quinoa and add lime juice and cumin to the rice/water mixture during cooking and then add a ton of chopped cilantro once it comes out. Perfect for taco bowl night which is a weekly event in our house!

Here’s our Instant Pot Brown Rice recipe: