How to Make Marinara Sauce in an Instant Pot

1. How to Make Marinara Sauce in an Instant Pot Introduction: Hi, I'm Vicky Wells. Welcome to my class How to Make marinara sauce in Marinara Sauce in an Instant Pot. This recipe kind of ticks all the boxes. Like a tasty sauce to go with your pasta dishes or for use in other recipes? Check! Like your food to be made from fresh ingredients? Check! Like your sauces to be vegan or vegetarian? Check! Trying to eat whole food plant-based? Check! Avoiding oil in your recipes? Check! And, for all you kitchen gadget lovers out there. And you're my kind of people. Want to use your instant pot for just about everything? Check and check! This class is suitable for beginners who know a bit about their Instant Pot, and have used it once or twice, right up to the seasoned cooks who use their Instant Pots on a near daily basis, as I do. Just what are we going to cover in this class? We'll start by showing how to prepare and sterilize glass jars. We'll explain how to do that in several ways. In the dishwasher, in the oven, and on the stove top. Then we'll move on to gathering all the ingredients needed to make the sauce. It's always a good idea to get all the required ingredients together before you start. That way, you'll be sure not to forget anything. Trust me, I've learned this from experience thinking "I can just grab the ingredients as I need them." And then later, often when it's too late, I remember the one critical ingredient that I totally forgot. With all the ingredients accounted for, we'll go over how to prep them, so there'll be exactly what is needed for the recipe. With all the ingredients prepped, it's time to cook everything in the Instant Pot. And we'll explain that step-by-step. I know I keep mentioning the Instant Pot by name because that's what I use. However, there are many different makes of electric programmable pressure cookers, and they should work just as well. So don't despair. If you have some other brand, it will work too. Once the cooking portion is complete, we'll move on to how to store your sauce by canning, refrigerating or freezing. Then comes the class project. That's where you can apply everything you've learned by making your own Marinara sauce. Not to worry, I supply a PDF copy of the recipe and all the instructions. I encourage you to experiment with the recipe and put your own spin on it. Then, let me know how it went for you and add a few pictures of your process and the results, too. Please follow me so you'll know what I'm up to. Just click the follow button. I'll be adding new baking, cooking, Instant Pot, vegan, vegetarian and whole food plant-based classes frequently. Click on the next video and let's get started. 2. Prepping the Canning Jars: Welcome back. In this video, we're going to prep the jars so that we can fill them with salsa or either of the tomato sauces that we're going to show you in these lessons. These jars are already clean but they're not sterilized. They are also the jars that we used last year in order to can are salsa and to can our tomato sauces. You may not be able to see that, but it is written on the top that it says tomato basil sauce on this one. We don't want to reuse last year's lids. The reason for that is that they may not seal properly. There may be a little nicks in them, it's not safe to use them. However, don't throw them away. If you put dry stuff in your mason jars, you can always use those. I've got peppercorns in that one and you don't need a fresh new lid to do something like that. But we are going to this year use brand new lids with sterilized jars. Now, we're fortunate to have a dishwasher that has a steam sanitize cycle. And that's perfectly good for sterilizing these jars, particularly when you're using a high acid food, which we are, all of these recipes are tomato based, very heavily tomato based. You can also sterilize jars by boiling them in water for 15 minutes. Or you can wash them and leave them wet and put them in the oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. That will achieve the same thing. The lids of course, needs to be sterilized as well. The rings - no - the rings are never going to get anywhere near the food. They don't need to be sterilized. Anything that might touch the food does need to be sterilized. My measuring cup is going to get sterilized. These two, I'm not even sure what they're called, but - funnels! These funnels that we're going to use to put the food into the jar without slopping over the side of the jar, they need to be sterilized. Anything you're going to stir it with needs to be sterilized. This doesn't need to be sterilized. It's actually a little magnet. What it's for is so you don't have to touch the lid at all, after it's sterilized, to put it on the jar. You put it, you would put it on the jar like that, put a finger on it and just remove it so the interior of the lid, you never touch it. This is just for getting the jars out of like I steam can on my Instant Pot. That's just for getting them out of the Instant Pot. That doesn't need to be sterilized either. That's pretty much it. Now we're just going to load up the dishwasher with jars, lids, all of this equipment, and get it sterilized and it's the best thing to do first. Before you start prepping. Before you put the salsa, or the tomato sauces in the Instant Pot to cook. You can start up the dishwasher and have, because you'd like you, it's best to put hot food into hot jars. You never want to put hot food into cold jars. You never want to put cold food into hot jars. You want hot food in hot jars. So if we run this through the cycle and it's going to go through a good high dry cycle as well. They're gonna be hot jars. Hopefully if we time it correctly, by the time the salsa or the tomato sauce, whichever recipe we make next, is ready. Okay, now we're going to load up the dishwasher with the jars, with the lids and with the various accessories. So just get them in there. Like I said, we're not using the old lids. Do a few here. We'll get that later. It doesn't matter. I want to make sure that we have the funnels, spoon, measuring cups. And, of course, the new lids. You can't trust that they're sterilized right out of the pack. You gotta sterilize them. Get them in here. Stand them up as best you can, but they'll get thrown around in the dishwasher anyway and get nicely sterilized as they're going I'm gonna put these up here. Now there's no point in you watching me load the entire dishwasher with all these lids and jars so I will finish it off. We've now got the dishwasher, load it up with 24 jars and 24 lids and various accessories. We're going to put it on a steam sterilize cycle. On my dishwasher. that means I need to use a normal cycle. High temp water, steam sterilize, heated dry. We're just going to start it up. There we go. It'll run through its cycle, we'll have clean sterilized jars, no soap in this. This is just to sterilize the jars. This is not a wash, this is just a sterilization. So we'll see you in the next video where we're going to start. We're going to show you what ingredients you're going to need for the next recipe and how to prep it. See you in the next video. 3. Gathering the Ingredients: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to make a Marinara sauce. Again, pretty easy, not a whole lot of ingredients. We're going to start. Make sure you get all your ingredients together before you get started. And what we're going to need is four-and-a-half pounds of tomatoes, plum tomatoes. We're also going to need an onion. A yellow onion is fine, just and we're gonna chop it up. We're going to need eight cloves of garlic chopped. We're going to need a tablespoon of salt. Sea salt or Himalayan pink salt will work. We're using Himalayan pink salt and a teaspoon, of freshly ground black pepper. We're going to need two tablespoons of sugar. You can substitute honey if you'd like. If you're trying to stay vegan. Sugar is good. If you substitute honey, you're not vegan anymore. One bay leaf. And we're going to have two tablespoons, but we've got several in here. You're going to have two tablespoons of Basil, a tablespoon of Thyme and a tablespoon of Oregano. We're also, we're going to use a cup, a cup of red wine. And you can use whatever wine you like, Use your favorite wine. It doesn't matter if it's boxed wine or bottled wine. I don't really know of any substitute. If you don't want alcohol in it, the alcohol pretty much burns off when you're cooking it. But if you really don't want anything, you can probably find a non-alcoholic wine. You could use that. You just need it to give it the flavor of wine in it. And at the very end, after everything is cooked, we're going to add two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, but don't, don't put that in your Instant Pot. We're gonna add it after it's cooked. Let's just recap to make sure we've got everything. We're going to need a cup of wine, red wine, whatever you want, whatever type you like. We're going to need four-and-a-half pounds of plum tomatoes. Now I know you'll find recipes that tell you the skin the tomatoes and seed the tomatoes and you can do that if you want to. I've never found that it was necessary and I kind of look at it as a bit of a waste. You're going to need one medium yellow onion. And you're gonna chop that. You're going to need eight cloves of garlic chopped, a tablespoon of salt, either Himalayan pink salt or sea salt. You can use table salt if that's all you have, too, you can do that. And a teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper, a Bay leaf, two tablespoons sugar, two tablespoons Basil, a tablespoon Oregano, and a tablespoon of Thyme. And like I said, the very last thing that goes in, after you finished cooking, everything else in the Instant Pot, you will add two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, either before or after you blend it. I've always put it in before I blend to make sure it gets mixed in really well, but you can do it either way. That's what you need. Gather it altogether and let's get started. I'll see you in the next video. 4. Prepping the Ingredients: Welcome back. We're now prepping all the ingredients for the Marinara sauce. I've done most of it, gotten most of the tomatoes and onions in there, but I just wanted you to see part of the prep, not have to watch me do all of it. If you're just using a knife to cut it into cubes, that's fine. Again, we're going to be blending this so you don't have to be that exact with what size the cubes are that you cut things into. I really like this. I call it my choppy thing. There's the size of the grate I've got in there right now. We've quartered the Roma tomatoes. Now, I have a suggestion. You always want to put that cut bit towards the back of this. I have found from experience, if you turn it this way, you'll get tomato guts, shooting out the side. So I just, I just do it this way. It goes very quickly, when you already have the tomatoes quartered. Don't, don't try and do half a tomato or certainly don't try to a whole tomato, you'll just end up squishing it flat and it just doesn't work. There's the last of the tomatoes. I've already done half an onion. Here's the other half. Now, you may notice on the chopping board, you may or may not notice. I have some paper towel underneath there just to soak up because you're gonna get juice everywhere. I don't care how many grooves you have in your cutting board, you're still going to get juice everywhere when you're doing this many tomatoes. So let's dump these in here. And all of the ingredients that we prepared in the first video. we're all just going to go right in the Bay leaf and sugar. And of course, a cup of your favorite red wine. Now, like I said before, excuse me. As I said before, the balsamic vinegar is going to go in after this is cooked. So make sure you keep it out so you don't forget about it. But at this point, we're just going to stir everything up in here. Now you notice that this is the inner liner of the Instant Pot. And I always, always, always recommend that you load the liner outside of the base. I've heard so many horror stories about people forgetting that the liner wasn't actually in the base and just throwing ingredients in a recipe they've got finding out that they've pretty much ruined their Instant Pot. So if you get into the habit of just loading the liner outside the Instant Pot and then transferring it to the Instant Pot just before cooking, then you'll never have that problem. Another thing you'll want to remember with your instant pot. Never, ever put it on your stove or cook top. Again. So many horror stories where people have put it on there thinking it's perfectly fine. They have a vent over their stoves and when they vent the Instant Pot, they think, okay, the steam can just go up the vent and then they forget and they accidentally turn on the burner that the Instant Pot is sitting on, melt the bottom of the Instant Pot, you've just destroyed your Instant Pot. Just a couple of words of advice there on how to do this when you're using an Instant Pot that can save you having to buy a new one. That's it. This is all nicely. You can see that with the wine in there, It's, so there's lots of liquids, so it's nicely mixed it up. We're going put it in the Instant Pot and we're going to start up the Instant Pot. So stay tuned. 5. Cooking the Marinara Sauce: Okay, now we've got the Marinara sauce ingredients all mixed together in the liner, in the Instant Pot base. As we mentioned earlier, it's still needs balsamic vinegar, but that's going to go in after this is finished cooking. Let's get it started. You want to put the lid on, turn it to the locked position and you always want to make sure that your valve is pointing to the sealing position, not the venting. Otherwise it will never sea,l if you still have it on venting. So we just want to do pressure cook. We want to do it for five minutes. Obviously, I had something in there that was in there for 25 minutes. It'll always hold the last one that you have. We'll set it for five. There we go. In 10 seconds, it'll turn on by itself. There's nothing else you have to do. It'll just turn on. And as soon as it gets up to pressure, The "ON" will change from "ON" to the 5 minutes that you've set it for. It will then start counting down the 5 minutes. When it gets to "0", it'll actually start, it'll put an L in the display and it'll start counting up. We want to give it a 10 minute natural pressure. So let it count up to 10 minutes before you turn it off and release the pressure. And that's when we'll blend the sauce. So stay tuned. We'll be back as soon as it's gone through. It's 5 minutes of cooking and it's 10 minutes of a natural pressure release. And we've released the pressure, taken the lid off and we will take the liner out of the pot again, put it on a heat proof surface so that we can blend it. You don't want to be doing that either while it's still in the base. So stay tuned. We'll be back soon. 6. Blending the Marinara Sauce: Alrighty. The Marinara sauce has now finished cooking. It's had it's 5 minutes under pressure. It's had it's 10 minute natural pressure release. So we're going to take the lid off. We're going to very carefully transfer the liner to a heat proof surface. So when you do this, you don't want to have to transfer it very far. You want to be very careful and you want to make sure you've got a good grip on it. You don't want to be doing the blending in there. I've got a good grip on it. Moving it there. Done! Now. We're going to I'm going to stir that. First I'm going to stir it. We're going to find the bay leaf and remove it. There it is. Let's get rid of that. It's all nice and stirred. Now, as I said, we have to add two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar at the end of the cooking. So we're going to do that now. This is 1/8th of a cup which is equal to two tablespoons. Give it another good stir. Then we're going to blend it. Now I use a stick blender. That's my preferred method. You can do this in batches in just a regular blender or Vitamix, any other type of blender, a Ninja. There's all kinds out there. You just do it in batches and then put it back together again when it's all done. So I've got this, I'm just getting it down to almost near the bottom. Just move it around. And you want to watch it, because it's going to happen fairly quickly. You can see it's becoming sauce really quickly. Almost done. I like to hold it just in the middle and get it swirling around. really good to know it's done. There we go. We now have Marinara sauce. We're going to put that in jars and can it. We do have a video showing canning, in this lesson. I cannot recommend canning the way I do because it's not an actual approved method of canning by I think it's the home safety something or other. Anyway, I'll put a link to the website for safe home canning, in the PDF possibly at the bottom of this video. I can mine in my 10 quart instant, or my EIGHT quart, keep saying ten? my 8-quart Instant Pots. But it is not an recognized approved method of doing it and I certainly wouldn't do it for anything other than a high acid food. I've been doing it this way for years and we've not had any trouble, but I cannot recommend it to you. You've got to decide for yourself whether you want to can it, whether you want to freeze it, or if you're just making a small batch, you can just keep it in your fridge for a week or two. It should be fine. But well, two weeks you might want to freeze it. So that's, that's Marinara sauce. Thanks for watching. 7. Filling and Steam Canning: Welcome back. Our sauce is now all ready. So we're going to want to store it. And there's several different options you have for storing it. What I'm going to show is steam canning it in an Instant Pot. Now, I'm pretty sure I mentioned it earlier. And I'm going to mention again, this is not an actual approved method of canning according to whatever agency covers safe home canning and safe food preparation and whatnot. However, on the printable PDF included with this course, there are links to both the US and the Canadian sites for safe home canning. So take a look at those. But I find that this method, steam canning it in my Instant Pot works okay for me. Well, it works well for me. But I only ever use it with high acid foods, which is what we're doing today. Now the other ways you can package up your sauce is you can freeze it. And if you're going to freeze it, be just don't put it in glass jars at all. You want some really clean plastic containers. Because if you use glass, the glass can shatter in the freezer. And I've had that happen. And it makes a mess. And you lose the sauce, and you lose the jar. And, you don't have to do it hot. Now, when we're doing it in jars, you want hot food and you want hot jars because that's the best way to can. You don't want cold food and hot jars and you don't want hot food and cold jars. So right now we have, the sauce is hot. The jars are hot and sterilized. They've just come out of the sterilize cycle in the dishwasher and also has all of the equipment that we're going to use. And I do have the lids as well, which we are going to handle with this magnetic implement so that we don't actually ever have to touch the lids ourselves either. This has been sterilized too. So we're going to start filling the jars. Oh, and, if you're using if you're not using the steam canning method, as I said, you can freeze it in plastic. You can let the sauce cool. If you're doing it that way, that's fine. Or some people even put it in plastic bags and let it cool and then get as much air out of the bags as they can and freeze it that way to take up a little less space. But let's start filling the jars. So as I said, everything here has been sterilized. I'm not touching anywhere that's going to touch the food. So always handle it by this, handle it like this. I'm gonna give it a stir. This has been sterilized as well. Let me give the sauce a good stir. And that's all we really need to do. And then we're going to start filling. Now, you want to fill the jars just up to where the neck is, just where the threads start. And you want to be careful. The reason we use the funnel is because we don't want to get any sauce on the edge of the jars because that would prevent them from sealing properly. Each jar holds about two cups. And i've I've probably got more jars here than I need right now. But it's better to have too many than not enough. Too many already sterilized There we are, we're just up to the threads there. And like I said, sometimes it can be a little fun getting these. There we go. We have our first lid. I'm going to move carefully, move the funnel to the next jar that we're going to use. Here we go. We're putting that on there. And we're gonna put this on finger tight. That's fine. And we're gonna continue to fill all the other jars. Now, you don't need to watch me fill all of the jars. So I'm going to stop here for a bit. I'm going to fill the rest of the jars. And then we'll come back and we'll show the canning process. We've filled up the rest of the jars. Now you'll notice that one jar isn't full. We actually got four full jars and one about three-quarters full. Now you can't can this one because there's just too much airspace. It won't can properly. So we're just going to put that one in the fridge and use it up for a recipe or on some spaghetti or pasta of some sort. These four we can, can, and I'm using an eight quart Instant Pot for canning. You can use a six quart, but you'll only get two or three jars in a six quart. So you'll have to do couple of cycles four fit comfortably in an eight quart. And you're going to have to put them up on a trivet. Now, the eight quart comes with this trivet, which is fine for a lot of stuff. But I have chosen instead to use a silicone trivet because it sits flatter and therefore the jars sit flatter and it's easier to make sure that the jars go in there properly and don't touch. So I would recommend this. You can use this, but you've gotta be careful how you put them in there because they get they get a little rocky. I have done it with this one before, but I prefer this one. So that's what I'm going to use. So, we're going to open up the eight quart. I don't know. Some people don't know this, but the handles, that hole and the handles is actually a place to store your lid if you want to. I don't do it all the time. Sometimes it just feels you know,. not safe to me, but that's what we're gonna do. Now in order to steam can in the Instant Pot in an eight quart, you're going to need three cups of water, which I have available here. This is the one and only time. I'm not going to tell you to take the liner out of the Instant Pot before you load it because we don't want to be jostling the jars when we try and put the liner back in. So this time only, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna leave it in the Instant Pot. We're going to put water in there. And we're going to add two tablespoons or an eighth of a cup of white vinegar. That just helps it build up the steam and then we want it to build up the steam. So we'll put that in. And then we're going to put the jars in. Now this is. This is particularly helpful when you're removing the jars when they're hot. But it's good to get into the practice of using it to put your jars and place them in there properly, too. This is rubberized, this part, and you just grab it under the neck there and squeeze really, really hard. And then just start placing them in there. And like I said, you want to make sure that they don't touch. They can be close, but you don't want them touching during the canning process. Get them all in there. You can manipulate them in there to make sure that they're not touching. There we go. Got them all in there and all not touching. Alright, so we've got them all in there. They're not touching. And we're going to close the lid. And now I'm going to tell you something that is also counter-intuitive because when you're using an Instant Pot and all the recipes, of course I'm going to tell you make sure it's in the sealing position so it'll build the pressure so it can cook the food. Well, in this case, because we're steam canning, it kinda doesn't apply. Now it's still going to seal, but we don't want it to build a lot of pressure. So you're going to leave the vent on venting. And we're going to select the steam function. We're going to set it for 15 minutes. Now. Like I said, it will seal. But because we've got on venting, it's not going to start counting down because we don't have it on sealing. So you've got to watch for the float valve to seal. And at that point you're going to have to manually time 15 minutes. And that's to make sure that it's canned for long enough. So it's gotta be 15 minutes once the float valve seals. But you're not gonna get any change. It's going to it's going to it'll go to the 15 minutes. It's done. No, it's gone to "On." But it'll never, ever start counting down. So we've got to watch for that to seal. So we're going to wait for it. We'll we'll come back when it's sealed, will count down our 15 minutes and we'll continue on from there. Okay. So the instant Pob has just sealed, the float belt has just sealed, but you still hear the steam coming out. That's because the pressure valve, the vent, is still on venting and that's the way it's going to stay. We're not going to set and that took 10 to 12 minutes for that to seal. We're now going to set a timer, a manual timer, for 15 minutes for it to remain in this state. And as you see, nothing is changing here. And we'll be back after the after the 15 minutes. We're just going to turn the Instant Pot off. It's still going to take a little while for the float valve to drop after that. Then we'll remove our jars. So we'll see you then. Okay. The float valve has been sealed for 15 minutes and at that point, we just turned the Instant Pot off. And then you have to wait for the float valve to drop because you cannot remove the Instant Pot lid while it still thinks it's under pressure. So, the float valve has to drop. It took three minutes. Once we shut this off, it took three minutes for it to drop. We can now open it. Be very careful. There's gonna be steam, it's going to be hot. And then we're gonna get the, the jars out of there. So let's open it up. Lots of steam. Oh, did you hear that pop? Another pop! All four of them. That was the jars sealing. I want to move them to a heat proof surface. I'm using a wood cutting board on top of the island here because we don't want to damaged the island. So let's go in and very carefully, As you, and you've got to make sure that you're under the neck. And as you're taking these out, good grip. Be careful not to knock any of the other jars because at this heat, you could shatter the jar if you give it a good bump. So that's bubbling nicely. And like I said, we've heard them all, all four of them pop, that's the pop you want to hear. That tells you that they're sealing. Very carefully squeeze and move them. The nice thing about silicon, is you can touch these handles, it doesn't get hot. And one more. There we go. Now, you want to just leave them and let them cool down. You heard them seal. But you want to double-check that they're sealed after they're cool, you can do that easily, but by just pressing in the middle of the lid. If there's any movement at all. It's not sealed properly. If it's not sealed properly, put it in the fridge, use it within a week. You're fine. Sealed properly. I've kept ours for up to a year. How much longer than that? They can I don't know. It doesn't last that long in our house. Anyway, we're just going to leave them, let them cool. So this is the end of the canning part of the lessons. So we'll see you in the class projects and then in the wrap-up. Thanks. See you later. 8. Marinara Sauce Class Project: It is class project time because I just know you're dying to make your own Marinara Sauce now that you've seen, how easy it is. I'd love to hear about what you did. Did you change some of the ingredients? Did you increase or decrease any of the ingredients like more or less garlic, salt, or other seasonings. Did you decide to can, refrigerate or freeze your sauce? Are you planning to use your Marinara Sauce with pasta or as an ingredient in other dishes? I've used it both ways and it's delicious, either way. Be sure to print out the PDF with the recipe, directions and links to the US and Canadian safe canning sites. That way you can make notes on the paper of any changes you make. I do that all the time as I look at most recipes as suggestions, and almost always change or add something, I can't wait to hear from you. 9. Marinara Sauce Wrap Up: Well, that's a wrap for Marinara Sauce. Let's just review everything. Here's what we covered. How to prep and sterilize canning jars. Gathering together all the ingredients and equipment you're going to need before you get started. Prepping all the ingredients so everything goes smoothly for cooking the sauce. How to cook the sauce in the Instant Pot. Don't forget to check the printable PDF for complete time in the Instant Pot. The time it takes to come to pressure cooking time, the natural pressure release timing, and the time it takes to release the rest of the pressure. Then we covered how to store your completed sauce by canning, refrigerating or freezing. Remember, if you're going to freeze your sauce, don't use glass jars. And whether you're using glass jars, plastic containers, or plastic bags, you'll want to label everything. Trust me on this one. Many times I've thought to myself, "I'll remember what this is." Well, if you use it within a month or so, that's probably true. However, much longer than that, and you're gonna start thinking, "Is this salsa? Marinara sauce? Tomato Basil sauce?" The only way to be sure is if they're labeled. Okay, let's continue the wrap-up. Finally, we got to the class project and you are going to do the class project. Right? Thank you so much for choosing my class How to Make Marinara Sauce in an Instant Pot. Please be sure to follow me as I have many, many more classes in the works. And if you'd like to follow me on Facebook, you can either follow me at facebook.com/ReluctantVegetarians or facebook.com/WFPBunderpressure Remember, WFPB is short for whole food plant-based. Once again, thank you for taking my class. I hope to see you in my other classes, too.