Instant Pot Vegetable Soup

I just recently hopped on the instant pot band wagon and I am so glad I did! I have been loving trying new recipes out and seeing my cooking time cut down dramatically. I’m definitely still on the learning side of it, having had some very successful dishes and a couple of total fails. This Instant Pot Vegetable Soup was the first original recipe I created and was happy with the results. It’s a great way to use up any leftover veggies you have in your fridge and is a great soup for a cold winter’s day. Bonus, it’s obscenely low in calories so if you are trying to watch what you eat (like me) this is a great and filling choice.

Now, again, I am absolutely a novice when it comes to the instant pot. I have probably only made like 15 recipes using it and some tasted great and a few were total fails. Here are a few tips/tricks/lessons I’ve learned so far in my novice time with the IP:

1. The recipe time indicated usually does NOT include time time it takes to get up to pressure. Many of these instant pot recipes say “only cooks in 10 minutes!” which may be true, but the pot has to get up to pressure first, which can take whole depending on what you are making.
2. The more liquid in a recipe, the longer it takes to get to pressure.
3. You can’t tweak an instant pot recipe as much as a regular one-at least until you are better with using one! The liquid levels in a recipe need to be spot on to cook right.
4. Don’t flip the value after to vent fully- almost broke my light over my island doing that and definitely gave my dog a heart attack! You can get it vent naturally for a couple of minutes, but then if you are short on time, like I usually am, I just use a spoon or whatever to open it ever so slightly and let the steam come out a little bit at a time until it’s fully vented.

I’m sure I will learn more as I go, but those are my tips as of now! I plan to try and make many more Instant Pot recipes so stay tuned for more tricks and lessons! Now onto the soup!

Like I said above, this soup is pretty versatile. You really can add any veggies you want to it. I also wanted mine with a little kick so I added some extra red pepper flakes but you can leave that out if you want. This soup made a LARGE batch and filled my 6 qt. Instant Pot to the max line, but I wanted it that way so I could have lots of leftovers. If you don’t need as much, half everything and you’ll get an average dinner amount or lunches for a few days.

Notice with the cooking times. The actual “cooking time” says 15 minutes, but it took a whopping 30 to get to pressure. So honestly it wasn’t a super quick recipe to make, but there was little prep before and I didn’t have to tend to anything while it was cooking, it just did it’s thing and that was that. Remember what I said about the amount of liquid, the more the longer it takes to get to pressure, so if you halved the recipe, it would probably take less time to get to pressure.

Overall I was happy with my first attempt at creating my own instant pot recipe, and the soup turned out delicious! My girls loved it, my son not so much, but that was not surprising seeing as if he likes 7 things and soup is not one of them.

Do you have an instant pot? What is your favorite recipe to make with it?