Saw an electric Cuisinart pressure cooker at Costco today, and bought it on a whim. Also bought some boneless short ribs. I love making short ribs but they take almost 4 hours on the stovetop. In an hour and a half, I had the best short ribs I’ve ever eaten–uniformly tender, rich and meaty, taking on all the flavors from the broth. Even the baby inhaled them.
Holy God. I am a pressure cooker convert. Would love any recipes from you guys–paleo-friendly especially (no white carbs or beans). If it’s specifically designed for an electric cooker, even better.
Me too! Same deal at Costco, same reaction. Love it. Made stew, made chicken and dumplings. Tastes so good and in many ways better than my crock pot. I’m thrilled.
I finally got one earlier this year. Just a cheap little $20 stovetop model. It’s fantastic. You don’t even need an hour and half for stews, more like 45 minutes to an hour max. They’re also great for making stocks, and a godsend for beans.
I got a nice stovetop model not long ago, but I think the gasket isn’t fitting right lately or I need to mineral-oil it better or something - I get a lot of steam leakage around the handle. I have to check the instructions. Otherwise I absolutely love it.
Drain Bead, the one time I tried short ribs I was … underwhelmed. Frankly, it was like a pot roast with bones - might as well just have pot roast. They gave off so much grease! Do you refrigerate overnight and then break off the hardened fat? If you served them the day you made them, how’d you deal with that aspect?
I was a bit worried about that at first, but the model I have has three pressure relief valves (a rocking little regulator that is the main release of pressure, and two safety valves.) It seems perfectly safe to me–you can even pull on the the regulator or safety valves to see whether it releases steam (working properly) or doesn’t (somehow gunked up.)
There are similarities between the cuts, but I find short ribs a good bit beefier in flavor. In fact, I’ve gone to using boneless short ribs in all beef stewing applications in preference to chuck (the usual for pot roast) and bone-in short ribs, shank, or oxtail if I’m in the mood for a braise.
Hee, I remember vividly the disaster with ours when I was a tiny little kid. Food all over. And horror stories of having important body parts blown off.
With most pressure cookers you can buy replacement gaskets.
my sister is the pressure cooker queen. I’ll ask her for some recipes. Can you eat lentils? She makes great recipes with left over Costco rotisserie chickens.
I don’t use a crock pot much at all (except to render lard or tallow). What a crock pot is good for is if you want to set something to cook and are going to be away from the house for 6 to 12 hours and don’t want to stress about your house burning down. Otherwise, a Dutch oven works just as well.
Yeah, I saw my cooker’s gaskets on Amazon - you should really replace it after a year’s use or so anyway, so I could buy one now and see if it helps. Maybe I had a pot sold to me that had been sitting around for a while.
I got two cookbooks off of Amazon as well:
The Pressure Cooker Cookbook Revised - wide variety of recipes, interesting food ideas. Fairly simple but this allows you to get an idea of cooking time and then use these recipes to build off of.
Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure - great basics, again, for vegetarians, including lots on bean/grain cooking times and ways to use them. Don’t expect much in the way of vegetarian “meat substitutes”; I think there was only one tofu recipe. Also, it’s mostly vegan, rather than vegetarian. Finally, I found some of the recipes underseasoned (and I’m not a salt fan), but sometimes just using a vegetable broth rather than plain water is all that is needed to really punch up the flavor.