Taking Apart An Instant Pot

Peace family, ever since Amazon Prime day, I have had so much fun cooking with my Instant Pot, but I thought I had killed it this weekend!

If you haven’t heard of an Instant Pot, it’s basically like a slow cooker and a pressure cooker had a baby together. It’s good for the cuts of meat that need to cook slowly in order to be tender (and it gets them done in a lot less time), for soups, grains and beans, and you can also make yogurt in it. It has a steel pot that you can remove, much like the ceramic pot in a slow cooker.

Things were crazy in my kitchen as I threw together a meal for a friend and unfortunately, I tossed a bunch of dry rice into the housing without the pot being in there! Oops! I was dismayed, and got to googling, but without much success.

I saw a lot of articles online about people who accidentally poured water inside (they turned the pots over and let them dry for 24 hours), but no matter if I searched for, “I accidentally spilled food into the inside of the instant pot” or “I spilled rice into the housing of my pressure cooker,” or even, “how to take the bottom off an instant pot,” there weren’t any blogs specifically saying what to do. They talked about preventative measures, such as getting yourself into the habit of putting a lid on your pot any time that you take the inner pot out, or laying a wooden spoon across the top to remind you not to put anything into it, but nothing for after you’d already messed up. Therefore, here is my walk-through, in case this happens to you!

So, if you accidentally poured rice into your instant pot, don’t feel bad, don’t feel stupid, and don’t panic! Unplug and turn it over to get most of the rice out. If you are like me, some of that rice slipped down under the heating element and got inside. That’s ok! It’s actually surprisingly easy to take the bottom off (some of these specifics might change on a different pot, but I’m sure they’re probably all pretty similar; mine is an 8 quart “Instant Pot DUO80 7-in-1 Multi-Use Programmable Pressure Cooker.”)

1.) Unplug the cooker, find a comfortable place to sit, and get your tools out.

Observe and assess

2.) Turn the cooker over, and look at the screw. Mine uses a torx screw, a screw that was invented in the sixties and is often used on electrical appliances (hopefully you can see from the picture that it has a little six-pointed star shape in the head.) Don’t panic! You don’t have to have a torx screw driver; I used a flat head screwdriver.

3.) Select your bit; for my specific Instant Pot, this was a 1/8 size flat head bit (it’s missing in the picture to show which size I selected).

Select a bit (this needed a 1/8 flat head bit)

4.) Remove the screw (lefty-loosey!), being careful to get a good grip so that you don’t strip it (unscrewing it was a lot easier than I expected it to be.)