Pressure Cooking

I must share with you the most amazing invention—perfect for Rvers—the pressure cooker. If you’ve never tried one or just have heard the horror stories of exploding food, stay with me for a minute. I love my crock-pot, but just knew that it had to go into storage. We brought it and I made a couple stews, but the thing is heavy and power hungry. I can’t see running the generator for 6 hours to cook stew or lugging it around and only using it when hooked up to power. I had heard about pressure cooking—pressure cooking uses pressure to super-heat water and cooks things really fast. As an example, you can make a 3 lb pot roast in 45 minutes or tasty barley stew in 10 min cooking time.

A bit of investigation revealed that pressure cookers aren’t dangerous anymore. They got a bad rap in the 50’s, when faulty designs allowed you to open them when under pressure, spewing the super-heated contents everywhere. Nowadays, they have 3 or more safety features protecting against over pressuring or opening. They physically can’t be opened under pressure and have overpressure relief valves. You do have to be careful not to overfill them and watch the steam when opening them, but they are simple to use.

I bit the bullet and bought a six quart stainless steel pot from Wal-mart and a how-to cookbook from Barnes and Noble. My first effort was a 3lb pork roast with sweet potatoes. I wasn’t going by a recipe and found out belatedly that a pressure cooker cooks veggies FAST—I was treating it like a crockpot and stuck everything in at once. The roast was phenomenal—tender and tasty, but the sweet potatoes were mush—oh well, mushed them with butter and had mashed sweet potatoes.

After that, I actually read the how-to (and yes, I read the instructions on the pot before using it—you do have to be careful with them). The cookbook I purchased, Pressure Perfect by Lorna Sass is wonderful. I’ve already tried her Beef, Barley and Mushroom soup (made this morning before Greg even got up—10 min cutting, 10 min cooking under pressure and 10 min just letting it sit there and cool naturally before opening.) and her “Curry in a hurry” with beef chuck and potatoes. Let me just say--if you love beef stew but can never get the meat all that tender or hate watching the pot for hours…try a pressure cooker. The meat just falls apart. Lorna Sass also has tricks for the ‘one pot’ gals like me—pressure cookers can tend to over cook some things, so she does things like make little foil boats for the carrots—you put the stew ingredients together then wrap the carrots in foil and pop in on top—result: tender, perfectly cooked carrots in the same time as the stew cooked. Oh yes—I also cooked wild rice with brown rice—15 minutes! And perfect.

Email me if you want more info about it…it’s a wonderful device (wyethia at gmail dot com).

Yes, I’m in love with a cooking appliance.