How to make Instant Pot pot roast that is so tender, it melts in your mouth. This easy recipe makes ultra-flavorful beef guaranteed to satisfy the entire brisket in the instant pot. Use an Instant Pot or another pressure cooker for this recipe. Pot roast is more of a method than a specific cut of meat.

To make it, sear a large cut of beef until browned on all sides, and then cook it with aromatics like herbs, onions, carrots, and broth until it’s melt-in-your-mouth tender. You can make this in a Dutch oven on the stove-top, in the oven, in a slow cooker, and a pressure cooker. Traditionally, the beef cooks at a low temperature for a long time. It’s because of this that tougher cuts of beef work so well. When I say tougher cuts of meat, I’m talking about the leaner cuts with lots of connective tissue. The time it takes to cook pot roast in an Instant Pot will vary depending on how large your piece of meat is.

As a general rule, when cooking beef roasts in a pressure cooker, assume 20 minutes of cook time for every pound of meat. You must understand that the time shown above is the actual cooking time, not the total time the recipe will take. For a 3-pound piece of beef, the total time required will be about 2 hours and 30 minutes. I know 2 hours and 30 minutes might seem like a long time, but for ultra-tender and juicy beef, we need all of it. The great news is that a pressure cooker makes much quicker work of pot roast compared to a slow cooker, oven, or when it is cooked on the stove-top. Now, I mentioned there was extra time for bringing the beef to room temperature.

After testing this pot roast recipe in our kitchen, we found that if you start with beef straight out of the refrigerator, the roast doesn’t become as tender as when you give the beef some time out of the fridge so that it comes up to room temperature before cooking it. For a three-pound roast, we found that leaving it on the counter for 1 hour was perfect. This extra time has another benefit, it gives us a chance to season the meat. Right after taking the beef out of the fridge, we season it liberally with salt, which means that as the beef sits, the salt has a chance to seep into the meat, making it extra tasty when cooked.

You might be wondering if you can use frozen beef for pot roast. That said, for the best results, we highly recommend following our method which calls for thawed beef that’s seasoned with salt and been left on the counter long enough to take the chill off. This extra time creates the most flavorful, melt-in-your-mouth pot roast. Using thawed beef also allows us to brown the outside of the meat before braising it, which adds a lot of extra flavor to dish. Instant Pot Pot Roast with potatoes, carrots, and herbs. Other brands make electric pressure cookers, too.

Step 1, Season the beef and bring it to room temperature. I’ve already touched on this above, but I’ll quickly do it again, here. After testing, we found that when we left the beef out on the counter to come closer to room temperature before cooking it, the pot roast was much more tender at the end of the cooking time. I also love that the beef gets a chance to sit with the salt for about an hour before cooking.

In this time, the salt seeps into the meat and helps to season and tenderize it. Step 2, Brown the beef on all sides. By browning the beef on all sides before cooking at high pressure, we add color to the meat and add lots of flavor to the pot. If your pressure cooker does not have this function, simply brown the beef in a heavy pan on the stove.