Cooking under pressure

Cooking under pressure is a brilliant thing. By this I don’t mean high pressure situations where you get home from work and everyone is starving and something not only edible, but delicious and healthy, needs to be served up in no time at all. Although clearly that’s a part of it. I just mean pressurised cooking. In a pressure cooker. A magical sort of pot that builds pressure and cooks food super quick while infusing it flavour. What a marvelous thing. And something I only discovered just a few short months ago.

Everywhere you look there are blogs and recipes for slow cookers. But what about people like me who are not organised enough to plan ahead so they can wake up in the morning and begin cooking dinner. Who don’t even have an inkling what dinner might be, much less have the ingredients ready. So slow cooking is out, and super quick cooking is most definitely in.

Why isn’t this more of a thing? Why so little publicity about it? And why is it so hard to find decent recipes for pressure cookers online? Don’t get me wrong, there are some recipes but many of them just don’t appeal and the timings given are sometimes shocking. I’ve seen recommendations to cook meat for 3 hours! In a pressure cooker!! In that time, I could just cook it in the oven. The point of the pressure cooker is to cook something that should take 3 or 4 hours in far less time. So I’m developing a selection of my own recipes through trial and error. Thankfully not so much error yet as I’ve only cooked stew-type foods and those more or less follow a formula. There is one really handy resource I’ve found that gives timings which make sense to me and appear to work. I’ve only used their meat timings though so can’t vouch for the rest.

At the moment, this is all a bit new to so I’m certainly no expert. I did some research before buying a pressure cooker and decided to get a traditional one (not electric) and spend over £100 to get a decent one that will last for some years. Mine is a heavy duty stainless steel one (not non-stick as I’m not convinced about about the safety of that) that came with 2 saucepans – a 6 litre and a 3.5 litre which is the one I actually use all the time.

Things I’ve learned so far:

There are generally 4 cooking stages: precooking, cooking at pressure, pressure release and finishing.

• Start cooking by sauteeing everything as you would normally.
• Add liquids such as wine or stock and some seasoning (but hold back some salt for the end of cooking) before locking the lid to build pressure.
• Once cooking time is over, turn off heat and release pressure before lid can be opened.
• Once the lid is opened, the saucepan will have more liquid than you need. This will need to be reduced, as the final cooking stage, in order to intensify the flavour of whatever sauce you’re making. Salt will need to be adjusted at this stage.

A few more specific examples:

• At high pressure (on a gas cooker) chicken legs and thighs take 7 minutes.
• At high pressure (on a gas cooker) duck legs take 10 minutes.
• At high pressure (on a gas cooker) pork shoulder cut into 1 inch chunks take 10 minutes.
• For all the above timings, pressure should be released via the slow release method. This means turn off the heat and wait. Patiently. Go and do something else. It takes roughly 15 minutes before the pressure drops and you can open the lid.

There’s still a long way to go and lots of experimenting to do. Once I’ve mastered a few stews and curries I’ll move on to something more creative. So watch this space and I will post my successes (and maybe failures  – but only if there’s genuine comedy value to be had).