Pailin "Pai" Chongchitnant has spent over a decade teaching home cooks to make real Thai food through her channel Pailin's Kitchen and her Hot Thai Kitchen cookbook. Trained at Le Cordon Bleu and raised in southern Thailand, she has a rare gift for explaining why a technique works, not just what to do. Her video reworking a classic massaman beef curry for the Instant Pot stands out because she doesn't just dump a recipe into a pressure cooker — she walks through exactly how to convert any stovetop curry into one, which makes it as much a technique lesson as a recipe.
About the recipe
Massaman curry is Thailand's most fragrant curry, built on toasted whole spices like cinnamon, cardamom, cumin, and clove layered into a red curry base, then simmered with coconut milk, tender beef, potatoes, and roasted peanuts. It's rich and a little sweet, with a warmth that reads more Persian-influenced-Thai than the sharper heat of a green or red curry. Traditionally it demands a slow three-hour simmer to coax the chuck beef into fall-apart tenderness. The Instant Pot collapses that down to about an hour total, including pressurizing time, without sacrificing the depth that a long braise usually earns you — because a sealed pressure cooker never loses liquid to evaporation, the curry comes out just as rich as the stovetop version.
Key tips from the technique
- Build a "semi-homemade" massaman paste by doctoring store-bought red curry paste with toasted coriander, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg, rather than starting a paste completely from scratch.
- Sear the chuck beef separately in a pan first for deep browning, then deglaze with a splash of water so none of that flavor gets left behind before it goes into the pot.
- Skip the water entirely — since a pressure cooker doesn't lose moisture to evaporation, added liquid beyond what's already in the coconut milk will leave the final curry thin.
- Add potatoes and onions after pressure cooking rather than before; they only need 10–15 minutes on sauté mode, and pressure-cooking them alongside the beef turns them to mush.
- Use a natural release with a damp towel over the lid to speed cooling, since quick-releasing a rich, oily curry can spit hot fat out of the valve.
Watch the recipe
Pai walks through the whole process step by step, from doctoring the curry paste to timing the potatoes, in her video below.
From our kitchen to yours
A curry this saucy wants a vessel that can go straight from stove to table without losing heat, which is exactly where one of our Casseroles earns its keep — ladle the finished massaman in and it'll stay glossy and hot well past first servings. If you're portioning leftovers for the week, our Stackable Insert Pans make quick work of storing the beef, potatoes, and sauce together without the fridge turning into a game of Tetris.
Give this one a try this week — it's proof that a weeknight pot can still taste like it simmered all afternoon. Happy cooking!
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