Americans have a strange relationship with pressure cookers.
For one thing, there’s the fear factor. Just last night I was at the supermarket, and the cashier asked what I was planning to make with some beef, beer, leeks, and egg noodles. “Probably some stew in the pressure cooker,” I told her. A look of horror flashed over her face. “Those things scare me,” she said.
The pressure cooker scares me a little, too, but not because I think it’s going to explode. My pressure cooker is a modern spring-valve model made by WMF. I say “modern,” because the spring-valve type is relatively new to the US market, having been introduced in 1990. In Europe, spring-valve was the new thing in the 40s. The spring-valve is replacing the old style of cooker, which is called a jiggle-top. If you can hear the word “jiggle-top” without laughing, you are more mature than I.
No, my problem with the pressure cooker is that I don’t really understand how to use it. Oh, I know how to put ingredients in, bring it up to pressure, and release the pressure, and everything comes out cooked in record time. What’s perplexing about the PC (I have to start abbreviating, even though I know it’s impossible not to read “PC” as “personal computer”), however, is that it monkeys with basic physical constants. I’ve spent years coming to an intuitive understanding of what will happen when I put soup or stew ingredients in a pot and cook them, and the PC mocks that.
It’s like if we moved to a planet with slightly different gravity. Everything would seem reasonably normal at first, but then you’d start to get weird aches and your clocks wouldn’t work right, plus it would turn out your wife was actually an alien and you’d keep hearing this voice in your head saying “get your ass to Mars.” In the case of the PC, the high pressure and 250-degree water destroy some flavors and boost others.
My biggest PC success has been with cabbage, which seems to come out perfect every time and only needs to cook for four minutes. The biggest failure was pork carnitas; the texture was fine, but they tasted like pork with gallons of lime juice and none of the other good stuff (poblano chiles, mexican oregano, garlic) that went in.
Yesterday I took Iris out for sushi for lunch and didn’t really start thinking about dinner until after four. A perfect PC night. I cut the beef chuck into cubes and put it into the PC with sauteed leeks and onion and some chunks of carrot. I poured in some dark beer and chicken broth, about a cup total. One thing I’ve learned about the PC is that you need to keep added liquid to a bare minimum.
I cooked at high pressure for twenty minutes and let the pressure subside. While the stew cooked, I quartered the mushrooms and sauteed them in a pan in some bacon fat.
What I envisioned was a rich and dark stew. What came out was beef vegetable soup. The beer was no longer noticeable at all, and the chicken broth was the dominant flavor. Not a failure by any means–we all enjoyed the soup. Iris kept picking up pieces of meat and saying, “That’s some beef!” But to me, the PC is still a roulette wheel in disguise.