Here comes serious comfort food: mac and cheese, tuna noodle casserole, chili mac, sausage gravy over noodles, cheeseburger casserole, and even some new favorites like dan dan noodles. True, not every recipe yields a casserole. Some are noodles in sauce—or as in the case of the first recipe, just in butter (heaven!). Most use standard dried pasta. A couple turn frozen gnocchi, a supermarket staple, into rich casseroles. And a few use rice noodles or Israeli couscous, a toasted pasta.
In no case will you make the noodles separately. Every recipe happens fully in the Instant Pot, starting with dried pasta (or frozen gnocchi, as the case might be). The creamy sauces are particularly astounding—although you must use canned evaporated milk, not regular milk (which can curdle under pressure without its being in a baking vessel of some sort or mixed into a batter). We’ll let you know when low-fat evaporated milk can work. Fat-free never led to good results.
Dried pasta is a pantry must-have. The quality of the results will be directly related to the quality of the pasta. Cheaper isn’t worse; more expensive, better. That said, it’s sometimes worth it to spend a few extra quarters per pound for better dried pasta. Stock up when you see sales.
There are no fast/slow recipes in this chapter. The texture of pasta is too compromised over many hours in a slow cooker. We know there are plenty of internet recipes for the stuff. But we find slow-cooker pasta becomes unappealingly gummy without major modifications to the recipe. Because of those changes, we can’t use the same ingredient list for both the fast and the slow settings. So we’ve opted out of the SLOW COOK function in this chapter. We hope you’ll forgive us, given that there’s so much comfort to go around.
Mostly, for convenience—but with this caveat: There’s a wide variety of marinara sauce on the supermarket shelf. Read the labels carefully to find a brand that includes nothing more than what you’d put in that sauce, if you were making it from scratch. Don’t use chunky bottled sauces or ones with cream or milk in the mix, but feel free to substitute jarred arrabbiata or fra diavolo sauce for the marinara in almost all cases.
Of course, you can use homemade Buttery Marinara Sauce (here) in every recipe that calls for marinara. And just to be shameless in self-promotion, we do have a knock-out, five-minute marinara sauce (made on the stovetop) in another of our books, The Kitchen Shortcut Bible.
Technically, it’s just “rice wine vinegar,” although few manufacturers label it so. Rice vinegar comes in two forms: seasoned and so-called “unseasoned.” The seasoned has added sugar and maybe a few aromatics. The unseasoned is a mild vinegar that is not sweet. It is the only kind called for in this book. As a maddening bit of labeling confusion, seasoned rice vinegar is sometimes, but not always, so labeled; and “unseasoned,” the sort you want, is rarely labeled “unseasoned.” Bottom line: Read the label and make sure there’s no sugar or other sweetener in the bottle.
Yes, in almost all cases. We had better success with gluten-free noodles made from a combination of grains, rather than just one. We had the best success with dried pasta made with corn and rice. When it comes to the pasta casseroles that round out this chapter, multi-grain, gluten-free, no-boil lasagna noodles are available at large supermarkets or online suppliers.
Yes, especially if you use the multi-grain noodles we recommend. In all cases, increase the time under pressure by 1 minute (whether for the MAX or the HIGH setting). That said, tastes vary. Some people like chewier pasta. If you’re in that lot, consider trying one of the recipes as written with gluten-free noodles and see if you prefer that texture to a softer feel.
Some noodles—particularly fresh pasta—are always made with eggs. However, the egg pasta we’re talking about are the familiar, wide, flat, dried noodles found in bags near the other pasta at the supermarket (and not in the refrigerator case). These are the noodles some of us grew up eating in tuna noodle casserole or even mac and cheese.
The extra-wide versions work best in the Instant Pot. We also tested the recipes with no-yolks noodles and found no difference in quality. And again, we found that the gluten-free egg noodles made from a mix of grains worked best. One note: There’s no need to adjust the timing for gluten-free egg noodles.
We call for two kinds: 1) rice stick noodles (also called “rice noodles for pad Thai” or even “stir-fry rice noodles” on some packages) and 2) rice vermicelli (sort of like a rice version of angel-hair pasta). Use the one specifically called for in the recipe, but feel free to substitute brown rice noodles of the same variety in any of these dishes with no other change in the recipe. But never substitute rice noodles for gluten-free noodles in any recipe in this chapter. The timing and the liquid ratios will be off.