Pressure Cooker Coconut Rice

One of my pressure cooker’s killer apps is weeknight Thai curries. I love the hands-off meal - stir everything into the instant pot, lock the lid, and I can unlock the lid to dinner. Well, almost - I can’t enjoy a curry without rice to soak up the delicious, spicy sauce.

My favorite side dish for Thai curries is coconut rice. Now, if I only owned one pressure cooker, I’d make it on the stovetop. But I own many pressure cookers…probably too many…and I can always pull out one of my backup cookers to make a batch pressure cooker coconut rice.

This is a simple recipe. It has four ingredients, and two of them are water and salt. The tricky ingredients are jasmine rice and coconut milk. They’re easy to find in your local grocery store nowadays; look in the asian food section of your international aisle. But, if you use them as much as I do, find your local Asian market. They will almost always have the coconut milk cheaper, and I buy jasmine rice in big, 25 pound bags. (We go through a lot of rice in my house.)

Two other questions I get asked:

Why don’t you use the rice function on your Instant Pot?

Two reasons. One, I want to write a generic “pressure cooker” recipe, not an Instant Pot specific one. I don’t know what kind of cooker you have, so I don’t know if I can trust the rice cooker function. Two, I’ve been making pressure cooker rice since before there were Instant Pots - I’m used to this method, and it works great. I’ve never felt the need to try out the rice function.

This doesn’t seem faster than stovetop rice - why bother?

It’s true, with “up to pressure” time and natural release time, it’s not a whole lot faster than stovetop rice. (It is faster - but only by a few minutes. It’s not a the time savings you get from pressure cooking a long-simmering stew.) My answer is convenience - I can stir everything into my pot, lock the lid, push the buttons, and I don’t have to worry about the rice until the natural pressure release is done. Easy peasy.

Video: Pressure Cooker Coconut Rice - Time Lapse (1:03)

Pressure Cooker Coconut Rice - Time Lapse [YouTube.com]