Barbecued chicken and sweet potatoes in the pressure cooker: the perfect combo for a weeknight dinner. Everything cooks in one pot—including the barbecue sauce!

Photography Credit: Coco Morante

Sweet potatoes seem to take forever when baked in the oven, but not so when you use an electric pressure cooker! I always whip out the Instant Pot when I want sweet potatoes in a flash—it’s my favorite way to cook them now, as they always come out moist and tender–never burned.

These BBQ Chicken Stuffed Sweet Potatoes are a meal unto themselves. They’re loaded with tender, shredded barbecue chicken, then topped with gooey, melty cheese. This all-in-one Instant Pot dish is one of my slam-dunk dinners, and the single-serving leftovers are so easy to pack for lunch, too.

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QUICK WEEKNIGHT DINNER IN THE INSTANT POT

I love making this dish in an electric pressure cooker for a few reasons:

It’s a whole lot faster than using the oven—by about half the time.

Everything cooks at the same time—the chicken and sweet potatoes

I can make a side salad (or just relax) while it’s doing its thing—the pressure cooker’s alarm tells me when it’s done, and it comes out perfect every time.

New to the Instant Pot? Check out our post How To Use an Instant Pot: A First-Timer’s Guide.

HOW DO YOU MAKE EVERYTHING IN ONE POT?

This recipe makes use of an extra accessory—a tall metal steam rack. This is how you’ll cook the chicken and the sweet potatoes at the same time.

While the chicken cooks in the bottom of the pot, the sweet potatoes sit on the steam rack and cook right on top.

WHICH SWEET POTATOES TO BUY

This recipe relies on using single serving sweet potatoes. They’re a bit smaller than you might usually buy—they should be about 4 1/2 to 6 ounces each. This is the size commonly found in bags in the produce section of the grocery store, rather than sold loose.

If you use larger sweet potatoes, you won’t be able to fit six of them on top of the steam rack; however, you may simply use fewer sweet potatoes and increase the cooking time, if you like. Large (8 to 10-ounce) ones will take 12 to 15 minutes to cook through.

DO A QUICK PRESSURE RELEASE

To avoid overcooking your sweet potatoes, you’ll definitely want to perform a quick pressure release right when the pressure cooking program ends.

The sweet potatoes need just 10 minutes under pressure, and if they stay in the pot for another ten minutes before releasing the pressure, they will become too mushy. That’s because when the alarm goes off, there’s still a lot of heat and pressure built up in the pot, so foods will continue to cook until the pressure is fully released.

You can leave everything in the pot on the “Keep Warm” setting after cooking if you need to, but you’ll still need to do a quick pressure release.

Don’t worry if the skins split! You may find that the skins on the sweet potatoes split during cooking—that’s totally normal for pressure cooking, and they will still be delicious! The skins on pressure cooked potatoes (both sweet and regular varieties) will be soft, rather than crispy.

HOW TO STORE AND FREEZE

The leftover stuffed sweet potatoes will keep in the fridge for 3 to 4 days. You can make them for dinner one night, then heat them up for lunch for a couple more days, too. They take 2 to 3 minutes to heat in the microwave.

You might want to leave off the cheese topping if you know that you’ll be reheating the sweet potatoes—it has a tendency to become chewy and tough by the time the sweet potatoes and chicken are heated through.

If you like, you may also freeze the chicken filling separately—just portion them out into silicone muffin pans or mini loaf pans. The single portions thaw much faster, and you can heat up as many as you like at one time.

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