rediscovering my pressure cooker

[maher]

I picked up some really meaty beef short ribs from my butcher and spent a couple of hours reading different recipes over the net to try and figure out what to do with them.

As near as i could tell every single braising recipe involved 3-5 hours of cooking. Being the impatient type i dug out the pressure cooker that has been gathering dust for years in the back of the kitchen cupboard.

All i can say is i am reconverted to the glories of this thing. I have for the first time totally fall off the bone ribs, and i got a phenomenal base stock for my french onion soup as an added bonus.

to top it all off, the entire process is a one pot, one hour job.

ill bet there are plenty of people on this board who have a pressure cooker somewhere in the kitchen (or even storeroom, or attic).

Dig it out, brown some beef short ribs in it, with a little oil, brown some whole unpeeled onions as well. then cover with water, add a couple of bay leaves, some peppercorns, cinnamon sticks and a couple of cloves. Lid on, and an hour later you have heaven.

[andiesenji]

I use my pressure cookers all the time.

The big one is used for canning and for the occasional really large item (like a whole leg of pork which would take many hours to cook otherwise).

I cook beef heart in the pressure cooker.

I also cook beef tongue in it because otherwise it takes a long, long time.

Cooking Under Pressure is my favorite cookbook for this process.

by Lorna Sass, this was published in 1989 and I have been using it for years.

Last year she has Pressure Perfect published and I bought it and found that she has been busy thinking up new things.

It is not the same as the older book but together they really fill the bill.

[Luckylies]

*bumparoo!*

Today is my birthday and my wonderful and thoughtful boyfriend got me a pressure cooker (5qt) & saucepan cooker. (kuhn-rikon). I'm psyched about new gadgets so I'd like to delve in to cooking with this thing. i'd love to braise and fry but have no idea where to start..in terms of non- instruction manual recipes. I'd love to know what the real world of good cooks (you) do with your pressure cookers. please help get me started!!!!!!!

ps. I have no interest in canning (sorry Andie, perhaps when I move out of the city and can afford vegetables)

[Octaveman]

Happy B'day Lucky....

I have a very old pressure cooker I inherated from my grandmother and I'm sort of in the same boat. I'm not really sure what to do with it.

BUT...the one thing I use it for without fail is to cook artichokes. I can fit two really big sized ones in there and let it go for about 20-30 minutes. They come out great every single time.

Bob

[KatieLoeb]

Happy Birthday Luckylies! Your boyfriend is indeed thoughtful, but I wonder if he banked on being the beneficiary of some of your fine cooking if he provided the proper tools...

I use my pressure cooker for pot roasts and such, and for stuffed peppers. I just made a batch of stuffed red peppers a couple of days ago and am still enjoying the leftovers.

[anzu]

I use my pressure cooker pretty much daily!

I usually cook Indian food, which really benefits from a pressure cooker. Virtually every family I know in India has at least one.

I use it for:

1) rehydrating and cooking dried beans and lentils. Lentils require no soaking but can be cooked immediately. The time they require varies depending on the type of lentil and whether they are whole or split. It can vary between 3 - 10 minutes once its come up to pressure.

For beans (I cook mostly chick peas and kidney beans. Not together ) you can either chuck them in the p-cooker and cook the heck out of them. This requires quite a long time, maybe over an hour depending on the age of your beans. I never do this actually. Instead, I use the pressure cooker for rehydrating the beans. Cover generously with water about 4 (or 6 or 8 or whatever) hours before you want to cook. Bring up to pressure, turn off and let the pressure come down by itself. You can leave it alone at that stage, though if I'm in the kitchen meanwhile, I might do it a second time later when the temperature of the beans has come back down. When you want to cook, it requires about ten minutes more in the pressure cooker to be fully done. Check before you start that the beans have not absorbed all the liquid, you may need to add more water, and give a gentle stir to the pot to ensure that nothing has stuck to the bottom.

If you are cooking something where, for presentation, it is important that none of the beans have split, you should tweak this cooking time downwards a little, as what I've given yields very soft beans where a few are beginning to split open.

Obviously, this can be used for non-Indian dishes as well. My mother always uses her pressure cooker for ham and split pea soup, for example.

2) To adapt Indian meat dishes (and other non-Indian recipes as well, of course) to pressure cooker use I usually reduce the stated cooking time in the recipe to approximately one third (time this after the pressure cooker has come up to pressure, not from the beginning of cooking). Take care with chicken, as it can easily get so overcooked that it is falling off the bones.

3) I also tend to use it for Moroccan dishes which usually require long slow cooking.

4) Cooking stock. Yes, it does go all cloudy, and is not the purist method or yields anything I would serve to guests. But sometimes, who cares? It's fast, and it's easy, and it uses up less natural resources in the form of gas or electricity due to the vastly reduced time required. And if the soup is then going to contain something which covers up the cloudiness - such as cream or pureed vegetables - then I don''t have any qualms at all.

5) Risotto. (yes, I know. Gasp, shock, horror. I NEVER stir risotto). This idea was taken from Lorna Sass' Cooking under pressure , though I tend to tweak her recipe so much that the only thing in common with it is the quantities for rice to liquid and the cooking times required.

6) Indian rice pudding (kheer). Normally this requires standing at the stove stirring constantly for far longer than risotto, AND it runs the risk of burning on the bottom because you are boiling milk with the rice for such a long time. So I looked at Lorna Sass' risotto recipe and several days later (enlightenment can come slowly) I realized that of course it would work for kheer as well. Indian rice pudding in ten minutes of cooking time as opposed to at least a couple of hours, AND with no stirring or burning (though there might be a little sticking to the bottom). When I told my discovery to Indian friends I got the response: 'But we ALWAYS cook our kheer in the pressure cooker.' Seems that everyone knew but me, and I had to rediscover the wheel.

7) English style boiled/steamed puddings (such as Christmas plum pudding). These require about 30-45 minutes in a pressure cooker, and much longer if cooked conventionally. If you've never cooked them, do try. There are many recipes out there, and although some English boiled puddings can be rather leaden in the stomach, there are also ones which are steamed, light, and delicious.

I cook a lot more things than just these, this is just to give you some idea of its possibilities.

I'd also recommend the Lorna Sass book. Nice food, and once you've cooked some of the recipes you'll get a feel for how to use the pressure cooker for recipes written for conventional boiling, simmering, etc.

If you want to get started on cooking before you've acquired recipes specifically for pressure cooker use, do note that it's important to use less liquid in you dish than you would use otherwise. Very little of your cooking liquid is being lost from the pressure cooker, and obviously the cooking time is reduced. Consequently there is also a reduction in the amount of the liquid lost from evaporation which usually occurs over a long period in conventional cooking.

If you neglect this fact, your dishes will be swimming in liquid and you'll have to do a lot of extra reduction.

Edited August 11, 2005 by anzu (log)