I love mine to death – we use it all the time for beans, stews, lamb shanks, curries, just about anything that takes a long time under low heat, you can shave ~ 2/3 off the cooking time under high pressure. The one difficult part is if you want to cook something for which there are different ingredients with different cooking times (like plov, for which you basically make a lamb and onion and carrot stew first, and then put rice and more water on top and cook that). Then you lose some, but not all of the speed advantage of the pressure cooker because you would need to cook in 2 stages, release the pressure after stage 1, and then let it come up to pressure again for stage 2.
We also use it all the time for arroz con pollo; brown the chicken, onions, etc. in the pan, then add the tomatoes, rice, water, olives and capers and cook on high pressure for ~ 6 minutes. Because chicken parts cook relatively quickly, everything is then done at the same time.
I haven’t tried it yet for desserts (except rice pudding) or risotto, but I’ll take the plunge one of these days. Best impulse purchase I ever made!
I made a fantastic pressure cooker beef stew with wild rice, carrots, and tons of onions plus marmite the other night. Yum. All in under an hour from idea to table.
Hey August, didja know that Beechwood Cheese is open again, under a new owner?
Littlenecks and quahogs cook fast and stay tender in the pressure cooker. It only takes a couple of minutes at pressure. But I usually use the pressure cooker for beef stew or pot roast. It also makes a great sweet potato pie. You can get beans and pea soup done much faster that way, but you have to keep amount low so it doesn’t foam up and clog the pressure valve. Swiss steak works well, you can brown it in the cooker before adding a little liquid and pressurizing it.
I wish I had a smaller one so I wouldn’t have to make enough to feed an army to make it worth while. I have the big 22 quart one for canning. I did make a turkey in it once.
Right, and that’s what KFC does, though Broasting is a trademarked name for a specific company. I don’t recall the whole process, but I believe the extra crispy stuff gets baked in the end. I should experiment with pressure cooking chicken in oil because I don’t like the way the giant mutant chickens they sell now come out with old fashioned frying.
I’ve got one, and I use it for canning. Just canned a whole bunch of stuff, in fact.
You can’t use your basic pressure cooker for canning (at least not safely), but you can use your pressure canner for pressure cooking, no problem.
The temperature is regulated by the external heat source. I’m guessing that’s a lot easier with gas than on an electric stove. When you turn the gas down, the reducton in temperature of the heat source is instantaneous, whereas with an electric stove, if you want to drop the temperature fast, you’ve got to move the cooker off the burner for a bit.
I can adjust the gas to hold the pressure canner at a constant pressuer (whatever pressure is required to safely can whatever I’m canning, usually 11 pounds, sometimes more). Not sure I could do that easily with an electric stove.
You can do a small number of potatoes fast in a microwave. I can do 5 lbs. at a time in a pressure cooker in just a few minutes.
There’s also some subtle differences in how the potatoes turn out. I will add salt to the cooking water, and the pressure cooker seems to almost inject the salt inside the potatoes in a way a microwave or even boiling doesn’t. I also suspect that the higher temperatures in a pressure cooker do a better job of rupturing the cell walls and releasing the starch, which has an effect on the texture of the potatoes. And since you use far less water to cook them, for example, with my mashed potatoes, I use only a cup of water to cook several pounds of potatoes, when they come out steaming hot from the pressure cooker, they absorb far more milk than I’ve been able to get potatoes cooked any other way to absorb (that makes for creamier, nicer mashed potatoes).
Risotto in the pressure cooker is pretty darn good.
And stock made in a pressure cooker is generally better than what you could do in a regular stock pot. Most cooking schools and restaurants make their stock in pressure cookers, both for time and taste reasons. The higher temperatures in the PC really help break down the connective tissues and collagen to help it gelatinize, which means more flavor. Even if I just cook chicken pieces for a few minutes in the pressure cooker, I’ll find the cooking broth will be lightly gelatinized if I refrigerate it overnight, which would never happen with stovetop methods.
I read that article too (it was a revelation) and started experimenting with using baking soda to caramelize all sorts of vegetables (for those who haven’t read the article, baking soda lowers the pH, which makes it easier for the Maillard reaction to take place). I now caramelize mirepoix for soup, I do roasted garlic in the pressure cooker, onions for pot roast and onion soup, and I’m planning on experimenting with other vegetables as well. Its really been interesting.
