Instant Pot experiments: Beef Stew, take 2

While the end result of this experiment wasn't at all bad, I'm still going to classify it as a failure.  Changes from last time:

• Doubled the butter and flour to thicken the sauce.
• Chopping the onion into 8 was a definite improvement.
• Switched out soy sauce for steak sauce
• Multiple additional ingredients at the "rest of ingredients" step:  1 pack sliced mushrooms, ground pepper, 2 cloves garlic, 1T dried parsley, and a can of tomato paste.

First problem... might be I added too much stuff to the pot this time around, or might be that the internals hadn't dried out enough from my using the pot for a separate chicken experiment two nights before, but the float valve never sealed.  Ended up running it through a second half-cycle to get anything reasonably "done", and even then the carrots were slightly under-done.

Second, while it wasn't bad at all, the tomato paste definitely took the flavor outside of what I would normally call "stew".  Between it and the added flour and butter, the mouth feel of the sauce was wonderful, but it added sweetness and, well, tomatoey-ness, that just wasn't what I was looking for.

So, next time... drop the tomato paste, use half as much carrots and potatoes. maybe knock back the beer to a cup even...that should be more stew-like, I'm thinking.