Introducing what has become my very favorite pasta meal to prepare: Simple Creamy Pasta in the Instant Pot!
This is one of those recipes you’ll want to keep in your hip pocket for days you have no time to cook. Because guess what? Making this takes less time than it takes to run through a drive through to pick up take-out!
As you know, I love having hamburger meat cooked ahead of time to pull out and use as needed for super quick meals. You can read here about how I cook 5-7 pounds of frozen hamburger meat in 30-minutes in my Instant Pot. It’s a HUGE time saver!
This pasta recipe only takes 10-15 minutes from start to finish!
If I already have meat cooked, I stir it into my Instant Pot with the other quick ingredients, turn on my pot, and have a meal after about 10 minutes. Total. It’s unreal!! (Meanwhile, I get out salad fixin’s and we’re ready to eat this nourishing, very tasty meal!)
If I don’t have meat already cooked, I quickly brown it in my Instant Pot before adding the other ingredients and I’ve only added a few minutes of prep to this dish.
Either way, you can see that this meal is incredibly fast to put together. And everyone in my family loves it. You can’t go wrong with cheesy, creamy pasta!!
Don’t have an Instant Pot?
I have this one and I absolutely love how much time it saves in the kitchen. So do consider investing! But if you prefer, you can mix the ingredients together in your crock pot and cook it on low for 4 hours. Then stir in the cheese and cream, and you’ve got an equally easy meal that cooked in your crock pot with no effort on your part!
Simple Creamy Pasta in the Instant Pot
- 1 pound ground beef, turkey, or venison
- 2 Tablespoons minced onion
- 1 pound whole grain pasta, any shape
- 24-ounces spaghetti sauce
- 3 cups water
- Sea salt to taste
- 1 cup parmesan cheese
- 1½ cups heavy whipping cream
- Cook ground meat and onion together until meat is no longer pink. (I usually have meat pre-cooked to stir into this recipe. But you can use the saute function on your instant pot to make this a one-dish meal.)
- Stir cooked meat and dry pasta into the instant pot.
- Salt liberally.
- Pour on spaghetti sauce and water, stirring until barely combined.
- Seal instant pot and cook on "hi" pressure, manual for 5 minutes.
- Do a quick release of pressure to open the lid.
- Stir in parmesan cheese and cream.
- Serve!
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I am really looking forward to trying this! I made your instant pot mac and cheese and it’s the only homemade mac and cheese my kids like! And I love it because it really is so very, very fast and easy! Thank you so much for sharing Laura!!
My kids loved this! I used whole milk and shredded Mexican cheese since that’s what I had. Loved it!!!
This is basically the same idea as my favorite, super easy one pot spaghetti, but I don’t always have cream on hand and almost always have cream cheese. I put about half a brick of cream cheese in the instant pot with the other ingredients before cooking. Looks a little funny when you first open it up but it stirs in nicely. So easy and yummy!
This is easy and quick. We used a blend of Colby jack cheese we had. I’ll be writing on my copy to add ground black pepper and 1 cup diced onions. After making this I couldn’t even detect there were onions in it…if those are diced small enough it can be a good way to hide onions from picky eaters.
Hi Laura,
I’m not sure what happened, but I made this today. I followed the directions exactly, but something went wrong. I sprayed the pot with cooking spray and browned the ground beef and onions, then I drained the fat before proceeding. I added the other ingredients, sealed the pot, hit the pressure cooker button (no manual button on my model), set it to high, set timer for 5 minutes. I kept waiting for it to finish preheating. It seemed to take forever! Then it went from ‘ON’ to ‘BURN’… it never did a visual count down for the 5 minutes. Luckily it was still edible, but a lot of macaroni and stuff was stuck on the bottom. It was delicious however. Did I miss something here? The pot is STILL soaking in the sink 45 minutes later.
Whoa, I can’t think of a reason this happened! It sounds like there wasn’t enough liquid in it to make it come to pressure, and then it just burned. BOO!! Think it needed more than 3 cups of water added for some reason?
Thanks for responding Laura, I’m not sure why my Instant Pot would require more water than everyone else’s? Like I said thank God it was still yummy. My husband loved it anyway! It took me all afternoon to soak and use a plastic scraper on the bottom, then a light scrub to get it clean. I’m pretty new to Instant Pot cooking, but I know that I followed your recipe exactly. Hmm…