You can make delicious Penne Alla Vodka recipes in the Instant Pot, or any other pressure cooker like the Ninja Foodi. It’s important to note that different brands of penne pasta have different cooking times, and as such, may require a different length of time cooking under pressure. Refer to my easy formula or table below for the cooking time closest to your brand of pasta and cook accordingly.

A set of measuring spoons and cups to measure out ingredients. This is a set of nice stainless steel measuring spoons and cups that will last forever. The printed measurements on these won’t wear off either like most cheaper plastic sets because the numbers are actually etched in.

At least a 10″ nonstick pan or pot to make this recipe or a Ninja Foodi pressure cooker like the one I use in the photos and video below.

A knife or mandolin to cut the onion and garlic.

Not required, but a garlic press is nice to quickly mince fresh cloves of garlic. This is the one I use and it works great, it’s easy to clean, and can fit a few cloves at a time. It’s also made of really durable stainless steel. The last one I had was a different brand and seemed to be made of some softer alloy, it busted after a few months of regular use. This one is a lot stronger. Once you start using fresh garlic, you’ll never go back to that stuff in a jar.

Not required either, but a bench knife is great for scooping up ingredients from the cutting board and quickly clearing surfaces of crumbs, flour, or bits of food that didn’t make it into your pan. It may not seem it, but a bench knife will become your best friend in the kitchen. This one is stainless steel like mine, and even has a ruler along the edge which is very helpful when cutting things to specific sizes or rolling out dough to a certain thickness.

Sometimes when cooking with certain cheeses like grated parmesan like for this penne alla vodka recipe, the cheese can leave behind a film or residue on the pot or pan. One trick I’ve found to easily and quickly clean this up without gunking up a sponge is to scrape it off with a flexible dough scraper.

You should always start every recipe by gathering your ingredients. This is called “mise en place,” which is a French culinary phrase for having everything in its place and ready for when you start to cook. If you don’t have your ingredients ready, you end up running around the kitchen wild trying to measure or chop ingredients before your recipe burns. If you have everything ready, you can add ingredients as you need them because they’re already prepared.

Melt the butter in a pan over medium-high heat and add the onions, cooking until the onions are translucent and soft, three to five minutes.

Add the garlic, breaking it up and stirring it in with the onions until the garlic is no longer raw, about thirty seconds to about a minute. Garlic can burn quickly so proceed to the next step before it browns.

Add about two shots or a quarter cup of vodka, cooking until reduced like in the photo above, about a minute. This helps to deglaze the pan, which just means unsticking all the extra flavors and sugars that stuck to the pan and reincorporating them back into the sauce using a liquid — in this case, vodka.

Add the crushed tomatoes, spices, and salt; then cook until this mixture reduces down to something that resembles a paste. This helps to remove excess water from the tomatoes so that the sauce doesn’t end up too thin, while also helping to release and concentrate flavors from the herbs and spices.

Then add the water (or broth) and pasta, giving it a stir to dissolve the tomato sauce mixture into the water.

If Making On The Stovetop:

Reduce the heat to medium, then cover the pan with a lid cooking until the noodles are done per package instructions or to your taste. Stir every few minutes to prevent the noodles from sticking together.

If the noodles aren’t cooked to your liking by the time the liquid is reduced to a thick sauce, just add an extra quarter cup of water and give it a stir.

When the pasta is done to your liking and the water has been absorbed by the pasta, the tomato mixture should be the consistency of a tomato sauce.

Add the cream and parmesan and stir it for a minute or two until the parmesan has melted into the sauce and the sauce resembles the GIF below.

Enjoy this as-is or top it with more cheese or add in any extras you might like at this point. I like to sprinkle on some mozzarella cheese and throw it under the broiler for a few minutes to melt it and give it some nice caramelized brown spots.