Fork Tender Cashews from the Instant Pot

If you're familiar with vegan cooking, you've likely come across a recipe or two that requires you to soak cashews over night. Soaked cashews can be pureed to form a rich, thick, creamy cheese-like substance. My most favorite thing to take to parties, when I remember to soak my cashews over night, is this Kick Ace Vegan Cheese Ball. The problem is that I forget to soak my cashews and I found out the hard way that you just can't cut that corner, it won't turn out OK.

Enter INSTANT POT!!! I just got myself an Instant Pot (affiliate link) pressure cooker and although I've only had it a few days, I feel like it's a huge game changer. So far I've processed 2 pie pumpkins from my yard. I pressure cooked them each for 14 minutes with a little water in the bowl and they were soft and ready to be processed into puree, loaded into jars, and tucked in the spare freezer. I also made some soup, lentils, and even some vegan yogurt!!

I couldn't believe how simple the yogurt was. I dumped 1 quart of organic soy milk (West Soy, just soy beans and water) into a wide mouth Ball jar, added the non dairy yogurt starter, shook it up, removed the lid, loaded it into the Instant Pot, hit the yogurt button, and walked away. 8 hours later, it beeped and I removed the jar, put a lid on it, and put it in the fridge over night. Bam! Yogurt. Holy moly!!

But then I saw that someone made a vegan lasagna in her IP. The recipe called for cashew based ricotta but I hadn't soaked any cashews and wanted to know if I could make it happen faster. Here's what I tried and it worked:

My recipe called for 1 1/2 cups of soaked cashews so I loaded 1 1/2 cups raw cashews into the Instant Pot. I covered them with water:

 

I locked the lid in place, made sure the valve was closed, and set the IP to Manual for 1 minute.

While I was waiting, I put the rest of the ingredients for the ricotta into my Vitamix. I used this recipe for Cashew Ricotta Cheese from the Simple Veganista which included water, apple cider vinegar, nutritional yeast, garlic, onion powder, salt, and pepper. *I should have used less water than the recipe called for, see note below. Maybe 1/3 cup next time.

The Instant Pot did it's thing and when it beeped to indicate it was finished, I let the pressure out right away. The nuts were fork tender.

 

I removed them with a slotted spoon and put them straight into the Vitamix canister.

 

I processed them on high until all the nut bits were gone and I have a wonderfully thick cheesy substance.

 

NOTE: This is a bit softer than I think it should be for ricotta so while I'll definitely use it, I think next time I'll decrease the water in the recipe a bit. This recipe called for 1/2 cup of water in the blender but I'll try 1/3 cup. All-in-all, I'm thrilled with the results though.

Thank you for reading,
Julie