Brown and Wild Rice Pilaf – Instant Pot

Brown and wild rice pilaf is an easy, delicious side dish that you can make in your Instant Pot. Try this hearty, hassle-free rice pilaf today!

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Brown and Wild Rice Pilaf Recipe

As I write this, we’ve been self-isolating for weeks now. We carefully plan our trips to the grocery store and only purchase things that we know we’ll use up quickly or that have a long shelf life. We have plenty of brown rice on hand at all times and I had picked up some wild rice without really knowing what I would do with it. The package of wild rice was sitting on the shelf in the grocery store all by itself. I tossed it in my grocery cart and found a home for it in this brown and wild rice pilaf. It’s a bit too costly and chewy to eat by itself but it goes really well with the other ingredients in this recipe.

That same day at the store, there was no orzo to be found. The pasta was pretty much wiped out, but there were some bags of melon seed pasta – a variety that I had never heard of – so into the cart it went. I wondered how it would do in this rice pilaf recipe, but it held up well. And, at 39 cents a bag, it was a bargain. If you can’t find it, of course, orzo or broken vermicelli works great.

Ingredients

• Brown Rice – the main ingredient in this rice pilaf.
• Wild Rice – darker and chewier than brown rice, provides a unique texture.
• Small Pasta – tiny pasta commonly used in pilafs. This recipe uses a type called melon seed. Orzo or thin vermicelli that has been broken into small pieces will work too.
• Chopped Almonds – for texture.
• Leeks – related to other alliums like onions and garlic. Use chopped onion if you don’t have leeks.
• Vegetable Broth – provides seasoning and water to cook the rice.
• Celery, carrots, and peas – add color and flavor.
• Butter and olive oil – used to sauté the leeks and rice.
• Fresh Parsley – snipped on top after cooking for color and flavor.

Making the Rice Pilaf

This dish comes together quickly. With a little bit of prep, you can set and forget these ingredients in your Instant Pot (IP).

1. Measure Ingredients.

• Get out everything you need so you can measure the ingredients.
• Wash the celery and leek and then chop those two ingredients.

2. Sauté the leeks.

• Select the Sauté setting on the IP.
• Add the butter and olive oil.
• When the butter is melted, toss in the chopped leeks.
• Sauté them until they’re tender, but not browned.

3. Sauté the rice, pasta, and almonds.

• Put the brown and the wild rice in the IP along with the pasta.
• Stir this mixture for about 2-3 minutes, until the ingredients start to brown.
• Stir in the slivered almonds and give the mixture another minute or so.

After a few minutes, the mixture should look something like this up close. The pasta and the rice are getting brown and toasted.

4. Add the vegetables and broth

• Heat the vegetable broth before adding it to the IP with the rice, pasta, almond mixture.
• Microwave the peas and carrots for about 45 seconds to get them hot and then add them to the ingredients in the Instant Pot.

5. Cook the rice pilaf

• Put the lid on the IP and make sure the release handle is in the sealing position.
• Set the pressure cook setting to 25 minutes.
• Now you can fix whatever else you’re having with the brown and wild rice pilaf, or sit down and relax with a glass of wine.

Serving Brown and Wild Rice Pilaf

This brown and wild rice pilaf goes well with any main protein, plus some leafy greens or a side salad. Below, we served it with pan-seared mahi-mahi and a green salad.

It’s also good the next day in a grain bowl.

What’s Rice Pilaf?

I don’t know when I first ate rice pilaf, but I liked it right away. You can find it as a side in restaurants and I’ve ordered it many times, thinking it was just a fancy way of saying “rice with peas in it”. But it’s way more than that. Pilaf is both a method and a type of dish. When you make rice, you use plain water and simply cook the rice until it’s done. It’s a perfect accompaniment to flavorful dishes when you don’t want the rice to compete for flavor with the entree.

PIlaf incorporates a flavorful broth, plus vegetables, and in some cases, meat. The pilaf method starts with sautéed onions (or in this case, leeks), the rice is then added to the sauté mix and cooked a bit, followed by the addition of broth and veggies. The result is a hearty, colorful rice dish that can be a side dish or, depending on the protein in the veggies, the main course.

Expert Tips for Making Brown and Wild Rice Pilaf

• Heat the broth before adding it to the rice mixture. This is an important step. Think of it this way — the rice is in oil so hot that the rice is getting toasted. If you add cold or even room-temperature broth to that mixture, it lowers the temperature of the rice that comes in contact with the cool broth. The rice on the bottom is still really hot and this means that the rice will not cook evenly. If you heat the broth before adding it to the sautéd rice, all of the rice will cook evenly.
• Add extra time to the pressure cook setting. Brown rice cooks in about 22 minutes in an Instant Pot, but wild rice needs more time. I pushed the time up to 25 minutes and found that this setting worked well with the brown and wild rice mixture.

Other Recipes You Might Enjoy

My Spanish rice is another type of pilaf and it’s made using an Instant Pot too. Brown rice with spinach and mushrooms is an easy dish that uses leftover brown rice.