Baking bread is a long grueling process, it takes a lot of time and a lot of tries. But instant pot with its magical ability to cut cooking times in half or quarter allows you to bake bread in less than an hour. It’s not just the cooking time being reduced, with the instant pot the grueling experience becomes a pleasant breeze.
But, when baking bread inside an instant pot, one particular thing might have freaked you out. That is, pressure cooking your bread, and especially the instruction where the recipe asks you to add 1 cup of water into the pot.
Who wants water in their bread? It’s a sensible question to ask.
Do I Have To Have Water In The Instant Pot When I Pressure Cook Bread?
We all know that adding water is a necessary step when kneading the dough. It helps incorporate all the dry ingredients and helps to activate the dry or active yeast. But adding water when cooking the bread is a bizarre thing to witness and to learn about. Not to mention asked to do.
Well, no matter how bizarre it seems, this is a very crucial step when cooking with an instant pot.
You are cooking the bread with your instant pot’s pressure cooking function. But without water, there is no pressure cooking. As you might have learned before, the pressure inside an instant pot is created by evaporating water. The evaporated water – which is steam – then builds up inside the instant pot. The build-up of steam inside the instant pot then creates pressure. It’s this pressure that allows you to cook faster with an instant pot.
Without water, there is no steam, and without steam, there is no pressure inside the instant pot. Thus you need to add water when cooking bread with the instant pot’s pressure cooking function.
But fear not, adding water does not point at soaking your dough in boiling water for 20 to 30 minutes. On the contrary, you are required to take precautions to avoid that. The bread-making recipe will always tell you to place your dough inside a metallic container and seal it properly. In this way, the pressure, heat, and steam will cook the dough, and the steam will not be able to penetrate the metallic container. The recipe will also tell you to dry the container’s lid off of any water residue, and take it out of the steaming – water-filled – environment before opening. Doing this will allow you to keep any amount of water and moisture away from the cooked bread dough.
So adding water inside the instant pot for making bread is necessary, so is taking proper precautions. Because, as weird as cooking bread in water might sound like, you don’t want to have a soggy uncooked product.
Cooking bread in an instant pot is easy, but it has its risks. As long as you avoid certain mistakes, you will end up with a Tasty after taste.
A pro tip. After cooking the bread throw it under the oven for 10 to 20 minutes. This will give your bread a glorious brown crust.