My First Attempt at the Instant Pot- The Half Successful Chicken

 

I just recently was gifted an instant pot. I have heard all about the rage of cooking with this magical device. How fast it cooks, how delicious and moist the meats are when cooked in the pot (yes, I said moist, grimace all you want), how quick the grains and vegetables cook, etc., etc. Therefore, I was very excited to try it out. And what could be more interesting for my first experience than cooking a whole chicken?

Here I thought I would be able to figure out the pot pretty quickly, but a lot of people were telling me all about how there are different warnings when cooking with the pot. For example, don’t overcook it, trust the directions with how long it tells you to cook that type of food. Be careful to follow the instructions precisely so you don’t get burned by the steam, and so on and so forth. Then I thought, well before I go ahead and use the pot I will read over the instructions carefully before starting the trial run. And that was when I realized how much I dislike reading instructions. Especially after a long day full of stress, I almost bailed multiple times on using the pot, while trying to get my brain focused enough to read about the trial run.

After much humming and ha-ing, I did the water test run after finding instructions on the instant pot website and I was feeling pretty good and ready to try out a chicken. I was craving Cajun spiced chicken and was inspired by the spices that are used in a Pinterest post I found. I got out all my spices and ingredients and was ready to start prepping the chicken. Meanwhile, my husband started to make us grilled cheese for dinner because we were so hungry that there was no way we could wait for the chicken to be done cooking.   

            I chopped up one large white onion into rough slices, followed by three large carrots and gathered a handful of garlic cloves. I threw these all into a bowl, added olive oil, salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, Italian spice, Cajun spice, paprika, cumin, a little bit of curry powder and massaged that into the veggies. 

            Next, I thought I would lather the chicken with olive oil and the same spices before stuffing in the veggies. Well this was when I realized that I had never put a lot of thought into cooking a whole chicken. Suddenly I started to feel very terrified about having to touch the cold carcass, and felt pretty sad for the poor chickie as well. Especially alarming was reading on the outside of the packaging that the chicken “may contain kidneys.” Well this set me off quite a bit and was now extremely nervous about stuffing veggies into the chicken. I called my husband to help me double check for kidneys and fortunately, to my great relief, there were none. After a couple of shudders at the feeling of the cold flesh in my hands I told myself to “suck it up” and that it will be worth it in the end. So I massaged the olive oil and spices all over the chicken and stuffed in the prepped carrots, onion slices and garlic cloves, as many as I could fit, into the cavity. 

            Afterwards, I added a cup of water to the bowl in the instant pot, because if there is not water, there is then no steam and therefore no cooking. Next, I set up the wrack at the base of the bowl, carefully placed my chicken inside, threw in the left over veggies around the chicken and tried to calculate how long to cook the bird. Now this is why I titled this post “The Half Successful Chicken.” My husband and I tried to guestimate how much the chicken weighed, thought maybe it would be around 3 lbs. Clearly, we were extremely tired from a long day and starving since it was late and hadn’t eaten any dinner yet. Since the pressure cooker said to cook a chicken at 8 minutes per pound, we set the timer for 24 minutes. When the timer went off (and we had finished eating our grilled cheeses) we went to see what our results were, feeling slightly skeptical that an entire chicken could be cooked in that amount of time. We cracked open the lid, stepped back as a cloud of steam was released, and peered inside at my chicken. It had been sitting on warm for about 8 minutes. Therefore I thought it should have rested long enough and I took a piece off the breast to see if it was fully cooked. From what we could tell it did seem cooked all the way through. I remembered being told that as long as you find the thickest piece of meat is completely cooked, that means the rest of it is done cooking as well. I was so happy and rejoicing that I had cooked my first whole chicken and used my instant pot for the very first time. We let the chicken cool the rest of the way and later put it in the fridge, ready to eat it the next day.

The next day came along and sadly the chicken wasn’t what we thought it was. My husband went to pull all of the meat off the bones and he realized that the base of the chicken was still pink on the inside. I was so disappointed. Here I thought I had cooked it all perfectly and that we would have a delicious dinner right away. Unfortunately, that is when we realized that we had estimated the weight wrong of the chicken. My husband thought it would actually be about three and a half pounds instead of three exact pound. And I later found out from my mother that whenever you stuff a chicken or turkey you always need to cook it longer than the calculated weight of the bird. Consequently, we cooked the pulled apart meat in our wok and had it with some spaghetti squash and veggies.

Thankfully, it still tasted delicious. I could taste the assortment of spices that were generously massaged into the chicken and absorbed through the skin. The savouriness from the Cajun mix and the subtle sweetness from the paprika were detectable as well. The smokiness from the cumin and the kick from the pepper (I love black pepper) would make my taste buds awaken from the harmony of flavours. It all complimented each other so well and we were nonetheless extremely satisfied with the meal.

Even though I was initially disappointed by how it was undercooked, I still had fun trying out a new recipe, and I learned a lot. Everyone makes mistakes and the important thing is you enjoyed what you were doing and you have learned what to improve on for next time. This is my first whole chicken, my first time cooking in an instant pot and my very first blog post. I told myself it is okay, no one is perfect and when you are a newbie it is even more okay to have a rough go at the start of new things. It will be even better next time.