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Cooking frozen ground beef in the Instant Pot is a convenient way to quickly cook frozen beef to use for dinner time! Ready in under 20 minutes, it’s no biggie if you forgot to thaw your meat for dinner!
On busy days (which is all of them, right??), we need this Instant Pot hack! We can use our Instant Pot to quickly cook frozen meat and we only have to wash the inner pot.
Use the cooked ground beef and add taco seasoning to make Taco Meat or beef dinners like Instant Pot Stuffed Pepper Soup or Healthy Instant Pot Ground Beef recipes!
No more setting ground beef on the counter to thaw, no more scrambling at meal time because you don’t have thawed ground beef.
How to Cook Frozen Ground Beef in Your Instant Pot
My method to quickly thaw and cook ground beef is super easy. All you need is water, frozen ground beef and your Instant Pot.
Trust me, you won’t find many recipes that simple, right?
As an added bonus – no an added necessity – the meat cooks up juicy and tender, not tough and dry.
We raise our own beef here on the farm and it is absolutely out of this world. So I have absolutely no interest in ruining perfectly fabulous meat, you know??
And we have a freezer full of frozen meat so it goes without saying I use this cooking method all the time!
Here’s how we’re gonna cook our frozen ground beef.
How to cook frozen ground beef in an Instant pot without a trivet
Place one pound of frozen ground beef in your Instant Pot. Lately ours come in square blocks like the one below. Add about a cup of water.
Close and set it to pressure cook time for eight minutes. Do a quick pressure release to let the steam out of the pot.
At this point, your beef is about halfway cooked through. Drain the fat & water and return to the pot.
Okay, not so appetizing at this point but bear with me, it’s working!
Set the Instant Pot to the saute function and continue to cook the ground beef. Break it up with a spoon or spatula until the beef is fully cooked through. Drain if necessary and use the ground beef for your recipe!
Unlike the microwave defrost function, thawing and cooking frozen ground beef in the Instant Pot keeps the flavor of the meat AND you only have one dish to clean up.
That, my friends, is a win in my book!
And of course, it goes without saying, the pressure cooker is pretty awesome for cooking fresh ground meat, too.
Tips for cooking frozen ground meat in your Instant Pot:
- You can also use this Instant Pot method to cook frozen ground turkey, ground chicken, venison or pork. Once it's cooked you can use it to make hamburger vegetable soup in under 20 minutes!
- If you have two pounds ground beef to cook, increase the cooking time by about five minutes. Some of this is just experimenting with your Instant Pot.
- Use the meat in any ground beef recipes like One Pot Chili Mac and Cheese, Instant Pot Chili Mac, Pressure Cooker Spaghetti with Meat Sauce, Cheeseburger Sliders or Sloppy Joes
- If you want to make this but you still haven’t taken your Instant Pot out of the box (yes, I’m talking to you friend), you may want to give my post about Instant Pot fear first and I’ll walk you through getting started in Instant Pot Basics.
Can I cook frozen ground beef in the slow cooker?
Actually, no. I mean, you could because it’s a free world and you can do you.
But I wouldn’t because you’re compromising food safety and trust me, you don’t want to do that.
So stick to the method outlined. I even have a handy dandy recipe card for you!
Easy Instant Pot Recipes
- Classic Chili Recipe for a Crowd
- Instant Pot Taco Meat Recipe
- Instant Pot Whole Chicken
- Chile Verde Pork Burritos
- Instant Pot Egg Bites
Instant Pot Frozen Ground Beef
Ingredients
- 1 pound of ground beef
- 1 cup cold water
Instructions
- Place one pound of frozen ground beef on the bottom of the pot. Add about a cup of cold water.
- Close and set it to pressure cooking for eight minutes on high pressure. Do a quick release to let the steam out of the pot.
- At this point, your beef is about halfway cooked through. Drain the fat & water and return the meat to pot.
- Use the saute button and continue to cook the ground beef. Break it up with a wooden spoon, spatula or potato masher until the beef is fully cooked through. Drain if necessary and use the ground beef for your recipe!
Video
Notes
Nutrition
This Farm Girl Cooks is not a dietician or nutritionist, and any nutritional information shared is an estimate. If calorie count and other nutritional values are important to you, we recommend running the ingredients through whichever online nutritional calculator you prefer. Calories and other nutritional values can vary quite a bit depending on which brands were used.
