Instant Pot Mushroom Barley Soup

Here’s a recipe for a delicious Instant Pot mushroom and barley soup that’s super easy to make. Filled with natural goodness and cooks up in an Instant Pot pressure cooker in less than an hour.

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• The Perfect Easy Recipe for your Instant Pot
• Simple Ingredients
• Soup starts with a mirepoix base
• Building the Soup Flavor
• Pressure Cook for 20 minutes
• Ready to serve
• Recipe
• 💬 Comments

The Perfect Easy Recipe for your Instant Pot

I absolutely love making fresh homemade soup recipes in my Instant Pot.  They’re easy to make and there’s nothing quite like having a nice hot bowl of soup that you’ve made from scratch. Soup recipes are also great starter recipes for anyone who’s just getting started with instant Pot cooking. They’re very forgiving and the results are almost always excellent. This mushroom barley soup uses barley, fresh mushrooms, fresh carrots, fresh celery, onions, a few simple herbs and broth to to create a hearty soup you can call all your own. Making soups with an Instant Pot electric pressure cooker is awesome because you can do so much with it in so little time.

Simple Ingredients

We love recipes that are easy to make and use simple ingredients. You probably already have lots of the ingredients already in your pantry and spice rack. Naturally mushrooms are one of the stars of the show. Baby bella or white mushrooms are your best bet. They both provide a great texture with a flavor profile what works so well with the barley and other ingredients. Pearl barley is the other featured ingredient of the soup. Make sure to use the regular barley and not the quick cook kind.

Ingredients include:

• White or baby bella mushrooms
• Pearl barley
• Onions, celery, carrots
• Vegetable broth
• Marjoram, sage, parsley
• Bay Leaves
• Salt and pepper

Soup starts with a mirepoix base

This soup recipe starts with a foundation of onion, carrot and celery. This is commonly refereed to as Mirepoix. This combination of ingredients are the base of so many delicious recipes, and for this mushroom barley soup, it all starts here. Once we’ve diced our onion, carrot and celery, we add them to the Instant Pot and use the “sauté” setting with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Once the oil is hot, we add our vegetable mix and sauté for 4 minutes. The carrots and celery will get a bright orange and green color and the onions will start to become translucent. And the smell is awesome too! Then, we add in the sliced mushrooms and continue sautéing for another 3 minutes.

Building the Soup Flavor

After we’ve sautéed everything, it’s soon time for the other star of the show, the barley. But first, we press cancel to stop the sauté mode and add in the 4 cups of vegetable broth. You can use your favorite brand vegetable broth. After the broth is added to the pot, use a wooden spoon to scrape the bottom of the pot. This is called deglazing and basically just gets any little bits of the sautéed vegetables off the bottom. And it’s a flavor that also adds to the whole experience. Then, it’s time for the barley. We’re only using a half cup of barley, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but trust me, it’s plenty! Those little grains grow a lot when cooked. Finally we stir in our herbs. A ½ teaspoon of each makes it all easy to remember. We’ll use parsley flakes, marjoram, and rubbed sage. This blend of herbs works so well with the mushrooms and barley. It brings a nice full, comforting and earthy flavor, without being to overwhelming in any particular direction. You can also add salt and pepper to your liking. I actually like to use a whole teaspoon of fresh ground black pepper and about ¾ teaspoon of kosher salt. But feel free to adjust the salt and pepper to your liking.

Pressure Cook for 20 minutes

Ah, the beauty of pressure cooking! While many soup recipes can take several hours on the stovetop or slow cooker, our Instant Pot gets the job done in a fraction of the time. With all the ingredients now loaded into the pot, secure the lid, set the vent to “sealing” position and pressure cook (on high pressure) for 20 minutes. Once the cooking time is up, let the pressure naturally release for 10 minutes, before quick releasing the remaining pressure.

Ready to serve

Carefully remove the lid and use the ladle to stir everything, as well as to fish out the bay leaves. Your soup is now ready to serve.

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