Instant Pot Ragu – Quick and Tasty!
The flavours that come from slow cooking are some of my favourites. In motherhood, I find speed fundamental to mealtime success. My Instant Pot Ragu is a great example of the corners we can — and should — cut if we want to feed our families fresh tasty food. The beauty of a pressure cooker is that you don’t have to wait all day and you don’t have to sacrifice on flavour either!
Equipment
- Instant Pot
Ingredients
- 3 small onions
- 2 carrots
- 2 sticks celery
- 900 g Minced Steak
- 4 cloves garlic finely chopped/ ideally minced
- 70 g tomato pure
- 50 ml red wine whatever you are drinking is usually good enough ;)
- 200 g passata
- 1 tbsp dried oregano at home I would use fresh rosemary but I left it and my camping store cupboard is limited
- salt and pepper to taste
- 2 tbsp olive oil
Instructions
- Blitz the onions, carrots and celery to make your Soffritto.
- Set the instant Pot to Sauté mode, add Olive oil followed by the soffritto mix.
- Cook for 5 minutes until sealed. I always aim to get a light browning on the mix.
- Add your minced steak to the pot in stages. You want to brown the meat and cook off any liquid.
- Once all the meat is added follow with the chopped garlic and oregano then continue to brown the mix.
- Add the tomato puree, mix through and leave to cook for 3-5 minutes. This step is important because you are developing a rich flavour and you want your pan to be sizzling before any liquid goes in.
- Add red wine and mix through. At home, on the stove, I would add much more red wine but because the Instant Pot is a pressure cooker and retains moisture I only add 50ml.
- Add the passata – I don’t add passata if I am not using the Instant Pot. I do it here because the IP doesn’t seal the meat the same as on the stove. On the stove we can really brown the soffrito, the meat and the tomato puree… Colour is flavour! But in the IP you don’t get that same depth to the sealing. The passata helps to make a richer IP Ragu.
- Add pepper and salt to taste (I removed some pre-salt, which I cooked the next day for the children.)
- When you are happy with the seasoning, turn the sauté mode off, put the lid on and cook on the ‘meat stew’ setting, high pressure for 30 minutes. I left mine to self vent for a while while we got the kids to bed. To warm it up I put it back on to sauté for a few minutes.
Video
Notes
The best thing about Ragu is that you can make it your own! Across Italian culture you will see everyone has their own version. I have a few versions of my own. I would encourage you to make this recipe work for your family. Add some grated courgette to your soffritto, use white wine instead of red. You can cook it with turkey mince if you are trying to cut down on red meat! What really matters is that the people around your table are smacking their lips and feeling good for it!