Pressure Cooker recipes: Pressure Cooking Today

I bookmarked this site a year or so ago and then forgot about it. I open the link today and find another very good site for pressure cooker users. The author is a woman named Barbara who states “I started Pressure Cooking Today to share my love of pressure cooking and challenge myself to create and share fabulous new recipes”.

The “tips” section links to articles on the benefits of pressure cooking; gift guides; how to use pressure cookers, both in general and brand specific; how to convert a conventional recipe to a pressure cooker recipe; and how to get a pan out of a pressure cooker (for instance, when you place a cake pan in a pressure cooker).

Recipes? There are a lot. Most are written by the site’s author (if not, the guest writer is introduced), and she includes a discussion of the recipe.

Ads, ads, ads. But I am getting used to this fact of life on the internet.

Pressure Cooking Today

The recipes below are ones I might like to try and/or cover the scope of the recipes on this site.

Creamy Mashed Potatoes. I decide to make these for our Thanksgiving dinner! Hopefully they work. The Pressure Cooking Today recipe is this:

Peel and quarter 6 russet potatoes. Add one cup of water to the pressure cooker pot, then place a trivet or steamer basket in the pot. Add the potatoes. Cook for 5 minutes on high pressure, fast release, and check the potatoes. If they are not fork-tender, repeat this step and check after “a few minutes”. (they are essentially steamed)

p.s. these worked out great!

Pressure Perfect by Lorna Sass (my book) calls for 3 pounds peeled russets cut in one-inch chunks, add one cup water, pressure cook on high pressure for 8 minutes, check for done-ness, and pressure cooking a few more minutes if necessary. (She does not mention a trivet.)

At this point, both authors state to put the potatoes through a ricer (I do have one of these) or food mill or use a potato masher (have one of these too). Then, add melted butter and warmed milk or cream.

My family tradition is to add butter and milk and cheese and mash with a portable mixer. I never warm the milk or melt the butter, and I also add cheddar cheese and some sour cream. I am going to stick to my tradition, and mixer-mash the potatoes right in the pressure cooker pot. Then, I can cover them with a lid and turn the pot to “warm”. That way, I lessen the burden on my crowded stove top, which will be full of pots and pans making gravy and cooking peas and beans for our Thanksgiving dinner.

Let’s hope this works!

Conclusion: Perfect results!

Country-Style Barbecue Pork Ribs. I often find country-style pork ribs on sale. This boneless cut of meat is often very fatty. Barbara states “Cooking them in the pressure cooker helps melt away the fat and leaves fork tender meat”. The ribs are cooked in a sauce of crushed pineapple, ketchup, onions, dry mustard, and fresh ginger.

Bone-In Beef Short Ribs. I tried these, and although the recipe worked, I don’t like the beef short ribs I get in my local stores. Too much bone, too much fat, too little meat. The meat is sort of tough and the flavor is not stupendous.

Lemon Cranberry Breakfast Farro. Someone else has discovered farro! I covered it in my grains posts series.

Frozen, boneless chicken breasts. Forgot to thaw something for dinner? No problem – just put a couple boneless breasts in the pressure cooker, cook on high for one minute, and you have thawed chicken breasts, just lightly cooked on the very outside and ready to be diced for recipes. Need an idea for dinner using said breasts? Try one of these pressure cooker recipes: Chicken Bacon Penne Pasta in a Garlic Cream Sauce, Honey Sesame Chicken, Chicken Enchilada Pasta (Rotel tomatoes, enchilada sauce, rotini pasta, lots of cheese, and the rotini is cooked directly in the sauce). And these are just a few of her suggestions.

Pressure Cooker Mongolian Beef. This recipe calls for flank steak, fresh ginger and garlic, soy sauce, brown sugar, and green onions. It’s “a pressure cooker version of PF Changs popular beef dish”.

Boneless Pork Chops. This recipe is like the “no-peek” beef dish that I used to make, often in a slow cooker, with mushrooms and a packet of dried onion soup mix. The thickness of the pork chops is discussed, which is helpful to me. There are other pork chop recipes too on this site.

Also browse this site’s soup and dessert categories, if you are interested.

Pressure Cooker recipes: AllRecipes.com pressure cooker recipes

I remember allrecipes.com from way back when it was solely a gathering of recipes contributed by cooks who also happened to be on the internet at the time. The web was mostly educational and personal sites back then, although it was changing rapidly. According to Wilipedia, “Allrecipes.com was founded in 1997 after co-founder Hunt had trouble finding his favorite cookie recipe on the Internet.” The first domain name was actually “cookierecipe.com”, but it quickly expanded to all foods and the name changed to allrecipes.com. And allrecipes.com became commercial, both onsite and as a print magazine. In 2006 allrecipes was sold to Reader’s Digest, and in 2012 it became part of the Meredith Corporation.

I went to the Way Back machine and found this stored web visit that shows how allrecipes.com looked then: 1997 www.allrecipes.com. That’s how I remember it! Back in the day.

Today I find the 2018 site, well, a little overwhelming. The pressure cooker page loads slowly on my slow connection – especially the photos, and the loading page keeps appending the recipes at the bottom. Good and bad photos of the cooked dishes. Ads pop up everywhere, videos are annoying and distracting, and icons beg to be clicked on. (I’m just here for the facts, the recipes. But I digress to my bent towards of non-commercialism.)

Still, this site has a wealth of recipes. There are hundreds of pressure cooker recipes, all contributed by ordinary folk who are usually identified by a clickable link. Many have their own websites (like me).

The thing about the allrecipes.com website is that there is no underlying theme for the style of recipes, except maybe “American style”. What I mean is, on seriouseats.com, the recipes are written by a handful of professional cooks. And on seriouseats.com, there are fewer recipes, most have an international flair, and the photos are amazing, as compared to the allrecipes.com site.

The second pressure cooker recipe website I am covering is:

AllRecipes.com

Note: When you are searching for a pressure cooker from the above  allrecipes.com link, you need to specify “pressure cooker” or “instant pot” when you search, or you get a conglomeration of pressure and non-pressure recipes.

The recipe I want to try from allrecipes.com is Chicken with Duck Sauce. We really like the way chicken in the pressure cooker comes out juicy but done. This recipe calls for a whole chicken, cut up. I decide to use less chicken: just two, bone-in chicken breasts. Will the amount of liquid in the dish and the cooking time need to be varied? I don’t think so, so I will go ahead with the 1/4 cup wine plus 1/4 cup broth that is suggested for a whole chicken, and go with the instructions “cook on high pressure 8 minutes, or until done” (quick release). I make a full recipe of the duck sauce.

First, I brown the seasoned chicken breasts directly inside the electric pressure cooker. Advantage: no separate stove-top skillet to wash. Disadvantage: I have to peer over the rim of the deep pot and reach down with a fork to turn them, and it splatters all over my hand. Can I skip the browning step altogether? No, un-browned chicken would look pale on the serving dish.

I add the water and wine and close the cooker. It comes to high pressure quickly because there is so little water and food in it. After 8 minutes, I check the chicken breasts. One is up to 160˚, but one is only at 120˚. So I take one out, and leave the other in for another 2 minutes. It is done, 160˚.

I was kind of wondering why the recipe instructions state: “cook on high pressure 8 minutes, or until done”. I mean, it’s not like stove-top simmering or oven-baking chicken when it takes just a second or two to check if it’s done. No, you have to release the pressure, check the chicken, then decide to cook a little longer. With this particular recipe – very little liquid and quick release – this “checking” step took only a couple minutes start to finish. So it worked. When cooking large amounts of food, like when I cook a batch of beans, it can take 10-20 minutes to check for done-ness and get the cooker back up to pressure.

I made the whole amount of duck sauce even though I was only cooking two pieces of chicken, and was glad I did. Some of it pooled over into my hot side dish of freekeh and broccoli and it tasted great. I used fresh ginger, and I strongly recommend it if you have some around. The sauce was simply delicious, almost sweet and sour. We both liked it.

Below, I am sharing several more recipes from the allrecipes.com collection. Some I am interested in trying, some demonstrate cooking methods, all demonstrate the scope of recipes the site includes.

Instapot Salsa Chicken. This calls for frozen chicken breasts – and they are added without thawing to the pot. This could be a real boon for those times we walk in the door ready to eat and nothing is thawed for dinner. (We live 6 miles from a small town so going out is not always convenient.) I almost always have frozen chicken breasts on hand. So, I could put them in the pot, add salsa and a couple other ingredients, and pressure cook for 15 minutes. A healthy dinner in 15 minutes! Instructions for beginning with thawed chicken breasts are given.

Double Bean and Ham Soup begins with non-soaked dry navy beans, and therefore will nicely season those beans. I find it odd that the recipe also calls for a can of pork and beans. What’s the point of cooking from scratch if you add such a processed canned product?

Messy Lasagna. Ingredients are ground beef, tomato sauce, spinach, ricotta, mozzarella, and more. The pasta is bow ties. Pressure Cooker Lasagna calls for no-boil noodles and goat cheese and more.

Pressure Cooker Bone-In Pork Chops, Baked Potatoes, and Carrots is interesting because you put the potatoes and carrots in a steamer basket inside the pressure cooker instead of down in the liquid.

Beef Brisket with Chipotle Tomatillo Sauce calls for medium pressure for 1 hour 15 minutes. I think this is silly, why not high pressure for less time?, this might be a good idea. Slow release, too.

Olive oil pressure-cooked whole roasted chicken. Nice spices, very little liquid. The cooking time is 16-20 minutes with quick release. The whole chicken is removed from the pressure cooker and browned under an oven broiler. The cooking liquid is made into a gravy for mashed potatoes.

Spicy Pressure Cooker Short Ribs are cooked in a spicy sauce that includes – cola! The pressure cooker should be a good tool for cooking short ribs, a tasty meat that needs a long cooking time. The site includes other short rib recipes too. Note: I tried these, the flavoring was good, but the ribs disappointing. The kind I get at the market are simply too fatty, with very little meat. And they are not even cheap. I think I will give up on beef short ribs!

Mexican Beef and Vegetable Stew is an example of how to cook a quick beef stew in the pressure cooker. The meat is browned and then pressure-cooked for 10 minutes, slow release. The the potatoes and carrots are added and it is cooked for 15 minutes, quick release.

In general, the allrecipes.com site has many versions of recipes for pot roast, pulled pork, stews, carnitas, barbecued pork, and chilis. It is a good resource for ideas.

Hardboiled Eggs in the pressure cooker take about the same amount of time, but the claim is that they will always be easy to peel.

Chocolate Mousse Cheesecake This cheesecake is rich with cream cheese, semi-sweet chocolate and cocoa, whipping cream, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, and chocolate cookie crumbs. It’s pressure cooked for 45 minutes in a springform pan on a trivet.

Copycat V-8 Juice! Boy, that would be fun. You start with fresh vegetables. If I had a garden, I would probably try this project. It’s processed in a “pressure canner”, not a pressure cooker. I used to have a very old pressure canner, but it’s gone off somewhere, so I’d have to purchase a new one to try this V-8 juice. According to the National Center for Home Food Preservation, electric pressure cookers are not recommended for canning tasks. Pressure canners are usually taller and bigger than electric pressure cookers, and can hold four or more quart-size jars standing upright. These canning cookers get up to higher temperatures than the electric type. The NCHFP has not tested whether or not electric pressure cookers get up to and sustain a high enough temperature to kill all the bacteria.

November 2018. Winter is creeping in on Colorado. It’s time again for hearty stews and soups. Back in January 2017, I started a draft of this post “Electric pressure cooker recipes”, and now it’s time to finally finish it!

I have been using pressure cookers since the 1970s, when I got my first stove top version. (See my 250 Cookbook post, the Presto Pressure Cooker Recipe Book.) About 4 years ago I got an electric pressure cooker, sometimes called an “instant pot”. I tend to neglect it since I store it down in the basement. So, I carried it upstairs for convenient storage.

The focus of this series of posts is to find lots of pressure cooker recipes, test one from each website, and then keep all my references and notes in one convenient spot. I want to become very comfortable using my pressure cooker with foods from beans to grains to meats to vegetables.

I am not going to discuss how to use a pressure cooker in this section. But for myself, I wanted a good reference book on pressure cooking, and I chose Pressure Perfect by Lorna Sass. (I bought the e-book.) I learned about Lorna Sass while working on my Grains posts, and purchased and reviewed her book Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way. I made a good choice with Pressure Perfect – I love the book!

The first website I am covering is:

Serious Eats

The Serious Eats Team has put together a page of 29 Pressure Cooker Recipes for Quicker, Easier Dinners. I became “acquainted” with one of this team, J. Kenji López-Alt, when listening to a podcast. After listening, I bought the hard copy of his 2015 book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. (This book is past my 250 cookbooks era.) It’s a fascinating, scientific-style cookbook that totally appeals to me. The Food Lab book is huge and comprehensive and has lots of great photos.

The pressure cooker recipes on the Serious Eats site range from traditional beef stew to chicken stew with lentils to Thai green chicken curry to black beans with chorizo to French onion soup to beef barley soup to Texas style chile con carne to rissotto to tomato sauce and chicken stock. Interesting flavors from Asia and India and America and Mexico and more are often woven into the same recipe. No borders in the cooking of the Food Lab Team!

I like that the pressure cooker recipes on this site that call for black beans have you add the dry beans directly to the pot. A recipe with pinto beans calls for them to be soaked overnight, then added directly to the pot. A recipe for chick peas calls for canned beans. Why do I have a preference for adding dry beans directly to the pot? Because it lends a lot more flavor than adding precooked or canned beans, and it saves the cook (me!) from having to plan a meal by soaking the beans the day before.

What I don’t like about the Serious Eats site are a couple of irritating ads: one keeps showing a video that distracts my eyes.

The first recipe I want to try is 30-Minute Pressure Cooker Chicken With Chickpeas, Tomatoes, and Chorizo. This recipe was created by J. Kenji López-Alt. He writes about the development of the recipe on another page. He states that, as per my own preference, he tried dried garbanzos first, but it took so long for them to cook that he used canned garbanzos first. Gosh, I love his photos! I could learn more than cooking from J. Kenji López-Alt!

I gather ingredients for this dish. I can’t find fire roasted tomatoes at the market, so I will use a can of Cento peeled Italian tomatoes. The chorizo is supposed to be the type that can be cut into chunks; I can only find ground fresh chorizo and a 3 ounce package of dried, cured chorizo precut into thin slices. (I added a small amount of the ground chorizo, cooked, and the entire package of cured chorizo, chopped into small pieces.) I do have smoked Spanish paprika in my spice rack. Garbanzos? I cooked dry garbanzo beans in my pressure cooker and stored portions in my freezer, so I will use those, but I don’t have quite enough so I will supplement with one 14-ounce can of garbanzos (chick peas). I have my own homemade chicken stock. For the chicken, Kenji may be able to cut one into serving pieces quickly, but not me – I choose packaged thighs and drumsticks.

Success?

Yes, my pressure cooked chicken with chickpeas, tomatoes, and chorizo was wonderful. Even my husband liked it a lot. He thought the chicken was cooked to perfection, juicy and tender. He even ate the garbanzos. I thought the flavoring perfect. I advise anyone trying this recipe to be sure to use smoked paprika. Yes, the chorizo lent great flavor and heat, but what sets this dish apart is the smoky flavor of the paprika. One whole tablespoon – don’t skimp!

I will try more recipes from this Serious Eats site. They keep adding pressure cooker recipes: the first time I visited the site there were 15, now there are 29. So keep checking back.

(Aside: I use one of the Food Labs pizza doughs when we make our outdoor pizza cooker.)