Sous Vide in the Instant Pot Viva. Set for 140 degrees; water is 134.2 after two hours.
Can you do sous vide in the Instant Pot? Instant Pot, the company, is now making its own immersion circulator, with a design similar to the best-selling Anova. (Warning! Affiliate links!) You can purchase the giant Aura Pro Multicooker, whose 11 functions include a sous vide setting but not the smart pressure cooker technology that made the brand. But that’s not what we’re talking about. Question is, can you do sous vide in the original IP, the pressure cooker shaped like C3PO which has a sous vide button on some newer models?
We were skeptical but willing to find out, and Best Buy had a Black Friday sale on the Viva, a model with the sous vide function. (To give ourselves credit, that was not the only reason we purchased; our early edition Duo was getting long in the tooth and we wanted access to any upgraded functionality.) And we decided to give Instant Pot sous vide a shot using a boneless pork loin roast, a cut that is very forgiving of temperature variations.
Temperature variations, indeed! We set the Viva to 140 degrees for medium/medium rare but after a couple of hours the water bath was just under 135 degrees. A variation like that would be fatal for a more delicate dish, like soft boiled or coddled eggs. We then cranked the setting up to 145 for the rest of the cook time and got the delicious, tender, almost-white slices we were looking for. A related problem is that the IP doesn’t have any kind of a circulation system which, of course, is going to exacerbate those temperature variations because water next to the product you’re cooking, the wall of the pot or the weight you might need to hold down the sous vide bag is going to be a different temperature than the open water in the pot.
Here’s the finished product, after searing in a skillet and slicing to serve.
Our conclusion: technically, you can sous vide in the Instant Pot, but you shouldn’t. It’s a good way to ruin an expensive piece of meat and maybe create a health risk. About the only thing sillier is the commenter in the thread on this post who uses the IP’s inner pot by itself as a receptacle when sous viding with a Joule circulator. Well, maybe that’s not fair (although there wouldn’t be much room for the food product after you mount the circulator on the side), but it shows the lengths to which IP fanatics will go to use their device for every meal.
By the way, our roast was delicious. Here is the recipe.
First, Using the Instant Pot Viva model for sous vide cooking, as per your article, how did you adjust the water temperature for 140 degrees? Using the +/- buttons did not seem to work for me. Second, I wonder if the thermal heating will cause circulation in the pot as the warmer water rises to the top and then is displaced as warmer water continues to rise and then the upper level water (that has cooled) sinks to the bottom again, thus keeping the cooking water warm and circulating. Any thoughts or trials of that?
Does your model have a button that says “Sous Vide”? If so, pressing that button and then using the + and – buttons should allow you to set the temperature. As to circulation of water, per the post above there isn’t any. The water overall should stay at the correct temperature or close to it (as I said in the post, I had to raise the displayed temperature to get what I wanted) once it is heated, but food that is touching the edges or touching other items in the pot might have a different temperature. All of which are reasons I don’t recommend sous vide in the Instant Pot. Wand style circulators are not that expensive and I see that Instant Pot makes one now.