Instant Pot Noodles

In case you get through this and think I’m only promoting Ninja, no I am not sponsored in any way for this post 🙂

If I tried to recall my favorite foods as a kid buttered noodles had to be on the top 10 (top 5?) of that list. Just some cooked noodles, a bit of butter, and a whole bunch of parmesan cheese. My dad worked from home which was a huge blessing for us. During the summer my sister and I were both at home as well so this was one of the staple meals that we found ourselves eating. I think if there was one person who loved it even more than I did it was my sister! She was also a lot better at making it than I was too. 3 ingredients so you’d think it wouldn’t be hard but for some reason her’s always tasted better than mine did. These instant pot noodles sure would have made our life a lot easier back then!

As an Italian red sauce is also one of my absolute favorite things. Whenever I make pasta with red sauce I always end up eating a spoonful just by itself. I also do the same thing with pizza sauce. There is just something about that red goodness that warms my soul. There are also times when I want to make pasta without the sauce added though. I’ve cooked pasta in the instant pot plenty of times, but it usually involved dumping in the sauce with the noodles to cook it. Minimally, the recipe would call for some sort of soup if it was more of a casserole type of dish. Sometimes you just need plain cooked noodles though! These are perfect for a pasta salad or casserole.  

Boiling noodles doesn’t take that long but I am all about the shortcuts to everything. I’m also all about the instant pot function on my NInja Foodie. The function of the Foodie makes it so that I can put everything in and walk away to do something else too, an added bonus. Plus, less dishes! We don’t have a dishwasher so I would much rather use one pot for our dinner than to have to use a pot, a strainer, and another pan for the toppings that I wanted to put on the pasta.  Once you get the hang of it there really doesn’t seem to be a downside to using the Ninja Foodie. When I figured out that you could cook plain noodles I knew it was something I wanted to share! 

How to Cook the Noodles

Add your noodles to the pot.

Add 1 ½ cups of water for every 4 ounces of pasta that you are cooking. I was using an 8 ounce box of Banza pasta for this so I added 3 cups of water. You could easily scale this up as much as needed. This could safely make a couple whole boxes of instant pot noodles if you wanted. 

Cook Time

You are going to use the times on the packaging to help you figure out your cooking time. Take the lowest number and divide by 2. Then subtract 2 and that is how long you will pressure cook. For my Banza example the cook time that was shown was 7-9 minutes. I took 7 minutes, divided by 2 to get 3.5. Then I subtracted 2 from that to get 1.5 minutes of cook time. Since I can’t put in 1.5 minutes I only pressure cooked mine for 1 minute. 1 MINUTE! Mind blown. You still have to add in the time that it takes the pot to come to pressure (approx 10-15min). In the end it still shaves off a lot of valuable time versus the manual boiling and cooking noodles. 

Just to give you another example of cook time, because it took me a bit to get the hang of it, I also have some organic penne pasta in our pantry. This pasta says to boil it for 10 minutes. If I was cooking this in the instant pot I would take 10 minutes divided by 2 for a total of 5. Then subtract 2 from that to get a total cook time of 3 minutes for this type of pasta. You can see it’s important that you use whatever the time is on your package of pasta to know how long to cook in the instant pot noodles. 

Final Product

I thought that these noodles came out great! To be fair, the Banza pasta always has a different finish to it than just normal noodles. They are not my husband’s favorite but even he said they were pretty good for not being real noodles. To finish this pasta meal I actually added a bunch of veggies to it. I used a can of diced tomatoes, some diced green peppers, and cut up some sausage that was already cooked.  I threw it all in the pot that was still on warm and just let it all heat up together.

The other great function about the instant pot is that it will keep your food warm until you are ready. Since I’ve been working from home it’s been so nice to throw something in there when I take a quick break at lunch or in the afternoon and it can then sit there until we are ready to eat it that night. The first time I learned about this function was someone talking about her potatoes on Thanksgiving. She would put the potatoes in to cook them in the morning and leave them in there using the warming feature until just before dinner when she would mash them and have them ready. What a great way to take off one of the many different things that need to be done on Thanksgiving day. 

There are so many ways to use Ninja Foodies and Instant pots. I’ve had mine for just over a year and I just found out this week that I could use it to cook noodles. How crazy is that?! The functions are just never ending and I can’t tell you enough how thankful I am for this small appliance in our kitchen.

Instant Pot Noodles

This is a recipe for JUST noodles (no sauce).

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Prep Time 1 minute min

Cook Time 1 minute min

Course Main Course

Cuisine American

Ingredients

  

• 1 1/2 Cup Water
• 4 OZ Noodles

Instructions

 

• Add your noodles and water to the pot. For every 4oz of noodles that you ar making you will add 1 1/2 cups of water.
• You are going to use the times on the packaging to help you figure out how long you should be cooking for. Take the lowest number and divide by 2. Then subtract 2 and that is how long you will pressure cook. For my Banza example the cook time that was shown was 7-9 minutes. I took 7 minutes, divided by 2 to get 3.5. Then I subtracted 2 from that to get 1.5 minutes of cook time. Since I can’t put in 1.5 minutes I only pressure cooked mine for 1 minute. 1 MINUTE!

Keyword Noodles, Pasta