Instant Pot Korean Beef

Instant Pot Korean beef has a sweet and savory sauce that’s a cheap meal served over rice. Cheap pressure cooker ground beef recipe even your kids will love with homemade sauce with tons of flavor with hamburger meat.

Easy Korean beef with hamburger is wonderful y’all! Why? Well we’re all about family friendly meals kids will love and this is on the top of my girls’ list of favorite Instant Pot recipes. (affiliate links present)

Korean Bulgogi Ground Beef Recipe

You see, we buy half a cow at the beginning of each year from a farmer so we have a lot! You too can buy meat online in bulk if you want. Just search local farmers in your area, or butcher shops and you’ll likely find a few that will sell you a quarter, half or the whole thing. Saves money and you get really great quality meats this way.

in Ninja Foodi

We make a lot of easy beef recipes here on The Typical Mom blog. We do a lot of them in our IP, Crockpot Express and Ninja Foodi recipes. All of them work the same as far as having the necessary saute and high pressure functions so the brand name doesn’t matter.

What is Korean beef made of?

Traditionally it is made with beef short ribs marinated in a sauce that may contain soy sauce, water, garlic, sugar and sliced onions. You can make a slow cooker Korean beef version using chuck roast too. Have kids though who will only eat the ground kind? I did too so I tweaked it to be made this way.

• BUT, I always like to tweak things a bit.
  • Just like with our Instant Pot beef stroganoff casserole that uses ground beef instead of stew meat, you never know which you’ll like better until you try it.

Using this allows us to add this pressure cooker recipe to our list of cheap Instant Pot recipes too. Use 80/20 or whatever you have on hand. With the addition of these bold flavors, I guarantee everyone in your family is going to love this. For lower fat you could opt for ground turkey meat, but not my preference.

Ingredients

• I do highly recommend getting a non stick pot though, makes everything easier.
  • Lean ground beef, my preference is to not drain the grease. It adds flavor to the dish but that step is up to you. Drain if you feel you must.
• Then add all of your other ingredients including:
  • Soy sauce creates a deep salty flavor
  • Beef broth is better than water to deepen the flavors
  • Minced ginger and garlic are a must for the flavor profile
  • Sesame oil adds to the traditional flavor, olive oil would work too but won’t add that umami
  • Brown sugar will give the dish sweetness you would expect
  • Red pepper flakes are optional for heat, more or less depending on if you want it spicy or not

If you’d rather use chicken, follow our Instant Pot Korean chicken recipe instead. It is one of my youngest daughter’s favorite meal and made with a similar sauce. Thighs work best because they have so much flavor and become so tender under high pressure.

How to Make Korean Ground Beef in Instant Pot

• Set to saute and cook ground beef to brown with your onions.
• Stir contents together so the precooked hamburger meat is coated with this delicious sauce.
• Close lid and steam valve and set to high pressure cook for just a few minutes.
• After the natural release time is up let out the rest of the remaining steam and serve in a rice bowl topped with sesame seeds and diced green onions.

With Rice

• Here’s an optional version if you want to cook the Ninja foodi rice pot in pot at the same time.
  • If you want to make it this way you’ll add a trivet with a pan on top to put your uncooked rice and water into.
  • Cook time of 3 minutes will remain the same, just the natural release time will be doubled from 5 minutes to 10.

How to thicken the sauce

I don’t feel like there’s a need to thicken the sauce with any corn starch like a few other dishes we make often. Left to sit for 10 minutes or so the sauce will continue to soak into the meat and thicken on it’s own.

If you like to use this type of meat in tacos, so do we. It can get boring though with the same spices and seasonings so this can change it up a lot. Instead of lettuce and tomato on top, use cabbage salad and sliced avocado instead. They are high protein meals with tons of flavor.

Of course you can cook the rice separately, that is why I include both sets of directions in the recipe card below. I do have a few different pots so many times I will make a batch of fluffy brown rice in one and this in another. When done I store what is left and throw the pots into the dishwasher. Easy cleanup!

This dish is also known as Bulgogi which means thinly sliced or shredded beef paired with soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, sugar, scallions, and black pepper

Many times it is cooked on a grill, sometimes it’s referred to as Korean barbecue as well. It can be seasoned or unseasoned but typically has a whopping flavor that’s sweet and salty. If you really wanted a nice coating you could make 1.5x the sauce recipe below so it is stickier and more gooey coated. 😉

This version takes less than 20 minutes though so it is a really easy recipe. You can find all necessary ingredients at your local grocery store primarily. If not I have links to order them online in the recipe card below.

Typically we always serve this 30 minute Instant Pot dinner with rice, brown rice would work too. Beyond that here are a few ideas:

• Sliced Asian pear is a fun side dish that brings in a bit of sweet and freshness
• You can make a bowl of Korean oxtail soup!

More ground beef recipes in Instant Pot

We have a lot of Instant Pot recipes here on The Typical Mom, but we will narrow it down to a few that are similar to this one.

1. Our sloppy joes pressure cooker style are always a favorite and so very easy to throw together on busy nights.
2. Instant Pot chili can use both hamburger and ground sausage. Mixing the two makes this over the top inside Ninja Foodi baked potatoes.
   1. Chili mac Instant Pot style is a second favorite one pot meal with everything cooked together.

I do have a printable recipe card at the bottom of this post. You can grab it and keep it handy in your recipe box or please come back if you’d rather (we’d miss you if you didn’t). A quick step by step to show you how we made these is;

What does Korean beef taste like?

Well that depends whether you use thin sliced steak or this method but the sauce and flavors remain similar. With the addition of brown sugar and saltiness of soy sauce you get that juxtaposition of salty and sweet meat. Add a bit of heat and you’ll give it a stronger whop of flavor for sure.