Instant Pot Curried Chicken and Chickpea Rice

This dish is not even pretending to be Indian. It does make for a good easy fairly balanced one pot meal, in not much time. I’m infamously slow in the kitchen, and really not prone to underestimating the prep and cooking times required for PR purposes. But, even I can get a meal like this ready in maybe an hour from starting prep to on the plate. With a decent bit of that being down time, waiting.

I grew up eating some very distinctly Western takes on curried rice, and loving them. This very much scratches the same itch, but as made by someone who has learned a lot more about actual South Asian ingredients and techniques in the meantime.

For a vegetarian version, just double the chickpeas, leave out the chicken, and use a flavorful vegetable broth. To make it vegan or just eliminate the dairy, use all oil or part margarine/plant-based “butter”. Virgin coconut oil would probably add a nice touch here. A higher proportion of vegetables added in would work well for anyone.

Substituting your preferred ground meat or something like Quorn for the chicken here will also work well.

Similarly, if you’re not in a mood for chickpeas? Substitute other cooked beans, or just leave that out and double the chicken. This dish is gluten free by default, unless you accidentally buy a curry powder bulked out with wheat flour. (Which did happen to me once, years ago back in the UK.) Please check all ingredients carefully!

Instant Pot Curried Chicken and Chickpea Rice

Quick and easy one pot rice dish

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Prep Time 20 minutes mins

Cook Time 15 minutes mins

Instant Pot Down Time 20 minutes mins

Total Time 55 minutes mins

Servings: 4

Course: Main Course, One Dish

Cuisine: American, Indian-inspired

Ingredients Method Notes

Ingredients

  

• 1 cup chopped onion 2 medium/small or 1 large onion
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• 2 teaspoon ginger minced
• 1-2 tablespoon neutral oil of choice
• 1-2 tablespoon butter or oil
• 300 ml Basmati rice 1.25 cup, or half a British pint
• 300 ml chicken broth or half a Knorr cube, crumbled plus water
• 0.5 teaspoon table salt or 0.75 teaspoon coarser Kosher salt
• 250 g boneless chicken cut into bite sized chunks about half a pound
• sprinkle seasoned salt for chicken
• 1 can drained cooked chickpeas or cook in advance (see notes)
• 250 g frozen small mixed vegetables about half a pound (see notes)

Whole Spices

• 1 bay leaf
• 1 small cinnamon stick
• 0.5 teaspoon cumin seeds or substitute ground in the powdered spices

Ground Spices

• 4-5 teaspoon mild curry powder shown here: a mix of Madras, and local generic "curry"
• 0.5 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 teaspoon paprika I used hot Turkish
• 0.5 teaspoon red chili flakes (adjust to taste) can substitute slightly less cayenne or other powdered chile

Garnish (optional)

• lemon or lime wedges
• chopped raw, or crispy fried onion (opinion is split here!)
• chopped cilantro/coriander leaves (which we were sadly out of)

Method

 

1. Rinse the rice well, and let soak in cool water while you prep the other ingredients, or for at least 25-30 minutes. Basmati cooks up much nicer if it is soaked, but see the notes for adjustments in case you prefer to cook without the soaking.
2. Start the pressure cooker on the Brown/Saute LOW setting. Add oil and butter to the inner pot.
3. Lightly season the cut chicken with the seasoned salt of your choice, and mix so it's well covered.
4. Saute onions until softening and just starting to brown around the edges, stirring occasionally. Add garlic and ginger, plus the whole spices. Stir more often, and let everything cook for a couple of minutes until it gets fragrant..
5. Add the chicken, and fry stirring occasionally until it has a cooked surface all over and is starting to brown a little.
6. Stir in the ground spices. Continue to cook, stirring, for another minute or so.
7. Pour in the liquid, and add any additional bouillon, etc.–plus around 0.5 teaspoon extra salt if you're not already using salty broth or bouillon. Add in drained rice and chickpeas, and gently stir to combine so that all the rice is submerged.
8. Distribute frozen vegetables over the top.
9. Pressure cook on "Manual", HIGH (which should be the default pressure setting) for 5 minutes.
10. Let the pot sit to natural release the pressure for 10 minutes before opening the valve.
11. Gently fluff the finished rice to combine the ingredients, and let sit uncovered to rest and steam off for a few minutes before serving. Adjust salt to taste.
12. Enjoy, with whatever optional garnishes you prefer!

Notes

Prepping the alliums and ginger. I used two onions roughly that size, and half the “one single large clove” variety bulb of garlic. The other half is also minced, and waiting in the freezer now.

If you prefer not to soak the rice before cooking, increase the liquid to 1.25x the volume of rice, or 375ml/1.5 cup plus a tablespoon or two for this amount of rice.

If you would prefer to pressure cook dry beans rather than using canned, here are excellent directions plus can equivalents over at Spice Cravings. That’s my own go-to quick reference now. I generally like to pressure cook larger batches at a time, and freeze what I don’t use in rough can sized amounts for later use.

Today, I just pressure cooked this around 150ml/⅔ cup of chickpeas in 500ml water with ⅓ teaspoon of salt. 45 minutes unsoaked on “Manual” HIGH was just about perfect in our somewhat hard water to get them nicely soft but not falling apart.

Frozen peas and carrots are a good choice some places. There is the similar vegetable mix in the UK which also includes corn kernels and chopped sweet red pepper. Here, for similar applications I like to use some multicolored carrot-heavy budget “Wokmix”, with any broccoli or water chestnuts removed back to the bag.  Today I also wanted peas. One major drawback to this particular blend in here, is that the yellow carrots visually blend in with the turmeric making the results less colorful.

   

We are basically just wanting convenient smallish pieces of vegetables which will stand up to this pressure cooking time. I would avoid broccoli or cauliflower, unless you want them falling-apart mushy.