The latest must-have kitchen appliance is undoubtedly the Instant Pot, and home cooks everywhere are beginning to realize just how versatile the multipurpose cooker can be.
Although it's been around since 2010, more and more people are getting into the gadget that combines both a pressure cooker and a slow cooker into one miracle machine. You can make soups, stews, casseroles, mac and cheese, yogurt and now, the true game-changer, wine.
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Food blogger David Murphey found a funny meme on the internet asking when someone was going to figure out how to put grapes in a slow cooker and make wine, so Murphey searched the web for any kind of homemade wine recipe for the Instant Pot and came up empty-handed. That's when Murphey decided to make his own recipe.
Murphey told "Munchies" that he searched the internet high and low for an Instant Pot wine recipe until he realized how he could do it on his own.
"The Instant Pot has a yogurt function, and you can use less heat. Before you knew it, I was shopping on Amazon and running to the store to grab juice and to test out my theory ... and it worked!" he said.
Murphey posted the recipe on his blog, and trust us, it's not for beginners.
It starts with a 64-ounce bottle of Welch's grape juice, a cup of sugar, a packet of Lalvin Red Wine Yeast and clear packing tape, if you can believe it. The process is pretty daunting -- and can take up to a month to get the perfect taste, so we won't bother paraphrasing all the technical things you have to do to make your own wine. You can see the full recipe here.
All in all, the entire process to brew the wine will take up a solid 48 hours, but you don't want to drink it quite yet. Murphey recommends waiting at least eight days for the wine to actually start tasting like wine, instead of a grape-flavored yeast drink, but the longer you let the wine sit, the better it will taste. If you have the patience, try and let is sit for a month so all of the fizzy CO2 will go away.
This begs the question: Is the wine any good?
"The grapes in the juice became alive and transformed into something more palatable," Murphey explained to "Munchies." "You can smell dark cherries and raw chocolate on the nose, and you can taste more complex flavors than what you started with.”
He also described it as "an extremely pleasant table wine."
With the rise of people brewing their own beer at home, will making your own wine in the Instant Pot become the new hipster trend? Only time will tell!
