Authors: Joel Brothers
Cooking Under Pressure -The Ultimate Electric Pressure Recipe Cookbook and Guide for Electric Pressure Cookers.: Revised Edition #3 - Now Contains 175 Electric Pressure Cooker Recipes.
COOKING UNDER
PRESSURE
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE & RECIPE COOKBOOK FOR ELECTRIC PRESSURE COOKERS
By Joel C. Brothers
Copyright 2014 by SLHR Publications
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express permission of the copyright holder, except for small parts used for reviewing, quotations, and news purposes by appropriate organizations and persons.
Third Edition
Revised 2015
A
cknowledgements
When the publishing company told me the book they had contracted with me to write was about pressure cookers, I was somewhat less than enthusiastic. After all, I am a professional chef, and chefs never use pressure cookers. They are what grandmother’s cook in, right?
I am pleased to say that I was never more wrong. Not only do pressure cookers retain the most flavor and nutrients in your food, but the modern models, especially the electric ones, are some of the easiest appliances to use. And I was really impressed by the safety features. We’ve come a long way from when my grandmother used to enlist our help with the canning chores. Modern pressure cookers are a serious culinary tool, and no kitchen should be without one.
While developing recipes for this book, I learned just how versatile a tool a pressure cooker can be. And how convenient, as well. I was sent a Wolfgang Puck 6 QT. Bistro Elite pressure cooker to use for this project, and I put it through every conceivable test, including breaking and repairing the handle, and allowing the seal to seat improperly and let the water steam out. The unit passed all tests with flying colors, and is still operating nicely. About the only thing I didn’t do was drop it from an airplane, or tall building. I am now convinced that good quality modern pressure cookers are a wise investment.
I would like to thank the Customer Service, and Technical Support people at Wolfgang Pucks company for all their help and advice. I’d also like to thank the people at the Home Shopping Network for sending me the pressure cooker, which they have allowed me to keep. Special thanks to the great people at Presto International for their invaluable information on design, science and the history of pressure cookers. And most of all, my most sincerest thanks to my loving wife, Sue. Without her assistance with proof-reading and editing, suggestions, and support, this book would not have been possible. And lastly, my sincerest thanks to my neighbors, who helped us eat all the left-overs when the refrigerator got too full.
I hope you enjoy using this book as much as I did writing it.
Sincerely,
Joel C. Brothers
Table of Contents
Introduction to Pressure Cooking
How It Works-The Secret Behind the Magic Trick
Beans and Legumes Cooking Times
Meat and Poultry Cooking Times
Seafood and Fish Cooking Times
Chicken and Sausage Cajun Gumbo
Chicken with Blueberry Drizzle
Cooking in Parchment (en Papillote)
Ham, Green Bean, and Potato Soup
New England Fisherman’s Dinner
Latin Pork Loin with Vegetables
Ginger Beef with Mandarin Oranges
Pressure Cooker Country Pork Roast
Pressure Cooker Pork Chops with Golden Ranch Gravy
PC Pork Roast with Potatoes and Carrots
Low-Fat Meatballs with Mushroom Sauce
Best Pressure Cooker Pork Chops
Pressure Cooker Pot Roast with Vegetables
Pressure Cooker One Pot Spaghetti and meat sauce
Pressure Cooker Cola Braised Short Ribs
Pressure Cooker Hamburger Casserole
Pressure Cooker Mongolian Beef
Pressure Cooker-Teriyaki Pork Recipe
Pressure Cooker Cranberry Pork Roast
Cider Beef Pot Roast with Sweet Potatoes
Pressure cooked spaghetti and meat sauce
Fast, Rich Pressure-Cooker Beef Stock
Creamy Chicken Tortilla Casserole
Garlic Chicken with Artichokes
Pressure Cooker Cranberry Glazed Chicken
Salmon with Pineapple, Strawberry, Mango Salas And Orange Lentals
Ginger Shrimp and Scallops Soup
Asparagus with Garlic and Tomatoes
Baked Sweet Potato Stuffed With Beans & Greens
Electric Pressure Cooker Dump Recipes
Hot and Spicy Braised Peanut Chicken
Fennel and Pear Chicken Thighs
Pressure Cooker Sichuan Beef & Carrots
PAR
T ONE
Basic Principles
Int
roduction to Pressure Cooking
Cooking today is not like it was even just 20 or 30 years ago. With single-parent families on the rise, both parents working, and everybody seemingly on the way to, or from somewhere, all the time, it has become much harder to function as a home-maker, whether you’re a mom, or a dad. With so little time, many families exist, for the most part, on fast-foods, and prepackaged, heavily processed foods with dubious nutritional value. Don’t get me wrong. I am not painting the commercial food companies as villains. They are doing an outstanding job in providing the world with a usable food supply, but there are limits as to what can be done to food, and still have it be as nutritious as it should be. Everything is a trade-off. For instance, most of the nutrition in a wheat kernel is contained in the oils and the bran. In fact, over 70 important vitamins and other nutrients are all contained within the oils and bran. But, once the grain is ground into flour, these oils, vitamins, and nutrients quickly oxidize, rendering them unusable within as little as 48 hours. And the oils will quickly break down and go rancid. So, in order for flour to be able to sit on a grocery store shelf, and in your pantry without going bad, these oils have to be removed. So all you are getting in a bag of flour is the endosperm part of the kernel, which is all starch, and little usable nutrients. To fight nutritional deficiencies like pellagra, and beriberi, food companies have to add some vitamins back into the flour from other sources, namely 14 vitamins and minerals that are essential to the body. This is what they mean when they say it is ‘Fortified’. Any time you see this word on food, it means that the finished product did not have enough nutrition left in it to sustain life, and they had to add some back to it. So, they remove 70 nutrients, and replace 14, all so you can buy a bag of flour and keep it on your shelf for a few weeks. We’re trading nutrition for convenience, because that’s what consumers want.
Is it a problem? Well, yes, and no. Most people do not eat just bread, and can get these other nutrients from other sources. But there are a lot of nutrients in food that react with each other, and affect things like our immune systems, and we just don’t completely understand how they work. We know that people who eat whole, fresh grains have healthier immune systems, and are able to maintain a healthy weight much easier, but we don’t know exactly why. This is just one of many examples.
Especially in the US, our population, on average, is over-weight, and we have an increased level of weight and nutritionally-associated health problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, etc... Even some cancers are suspected to be linked, at least partially, to nutrition. Food additives, used to preserve food longer on the shelf, or enhance the flavor (such as lots of added sugar and salt) directly contribute to these health issues. We’ve been making these trade-offs for so long that we seem to be unable to determine a ‘break-even’ point. At what level do the health risks outweigh the importance of convenience? At the present time, an individual must make that decision on their own.
But even if you do decide that the risks are too great, what can you do? Most people do not have the time, knowledge, or facilities to make most of their own flour, cornmeal, bread, or make things from scratch, like catsup (to avoid the high fructose corn syrup used in making it....a major contributer to diabetes...), mustard, and other things. Normally, dried beans take a lot of planning, such as overnight soaking, and take hours to cook. Unless you want to feed your family at midnight, that makes cooking them when you get home from your job, an unworkable proposition.
Who would have ever thought that a 500 year-old invention could save the situation? A long time ago (1649 AD...), a thoughtful mathematician and physicist came up with a way to preserve most of the nutrients in food, and allow it to be transported great distances, feed ships crews, transport food to the needy in remote areas of the world, and in the early 18th century it was even used to feed Napoleons army. During the Great Depression, it was used to get the most nutrition out of the available foods, and even to be able to eat some things that normally would be too tough to be edible. During WW-II, it was used to speed up cooking times for women working in Defense plants, and to get the most out of their rationed foods. The answer, it would seem, has been around even before the problem existed.
I am speaking of the humble pressure cooker. Although it has gone through several evolutions in the last 500 years, it still operates on the same basic principles as Papin’s original ‘Digester’. That is to say, super-heated steam is used under pressure to drive in nutrients and flavor, rather than leach it out or destroy it, as in other cooking methods. Through a simple application of a few basic Laws of Physics, most of the available nutrition in food can be retained, as well as significantly shortening the cooking time. With a modern pressure cooker, entire meals, even dried beans, can be prepared in a hour, or less. Whole grains can be cooked in minutes, instead of hours, and food can even be canned at home, with complete quality-control, for future use. It is possible to break the cycle of huge amounts of salts, sugars, preservatives and other additives that may be effecting you, and you family’s health adversely.
There are a host of advantages to using a modern pressure cooker:
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Speed-as a rule, most foods will cook in a third of the time in a pressure cooker. Some, even faster.
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More nutrition-pressure cooking is the #1 way to preserve the most nutrients in your food, other than eating them raw. It retains the most nutrients of any other cooking method there is.
■
Convenience-most modern electric pressure cookers can be safely loaded, turned on, and left to cook while you are at work. They have digital electronics that monitor the food, keep it warm for as long as two days, and will stop cooking when the food is done, or if there are any safety issues, all automatically. Dinner can be ready as soon as everyone gets home.
■
Safety-frozen foods can be easily cooked without thawing them out, making it much safer, especially for fast spoiling foods like fish, seafood and poultry. All modern pressure cookers have redundant safety features for over-pressure, under pressure, and will not let you open the lid if there is pressure in the unit. They are as safe as cooking gets.
■
Better health-pressure cooked food do not require a lot of oils, fats, and spices to cook. You can reduce them to almost nothing, and enjoy the natural taste of the food itself. This results in fewer bad calories, lower cholesterol, less sugar and salt, etc....
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Ease of use-pressure cookers are so easy to use that anyone, regardless of what level of culinary talent they have (if any at all...) can successfully use a modern pressure cooker. Even children can quickly master the basic principles involved (but children should always be supervised when doing anything in the kitchen...even dishes and sweeping...). Cooking doesn’t get any easier than this. It’s as fool-proof as cooking gets.
There are probably a lot of other advantages as well. You’re really only limited by your imagination. In the following pages, you’ll see a lot of information on what a pressure cooker is, how it came to be, how to select one, how to use it, and some recipes to get you started. Take time to read the whole book, and get the most out of your cooker. In no time at all, you will become master of your own culinary destiny.
Bon apatite
Modern Day Pressure Cookers
Thankfully, the art of pressure cooking was saved by the issuance of a U.S. Patent for an electric pressure-cooker, in 1991. Taking advantage of current technology, the new First Generation electric pressure cookers used electronic sensors to continuously monitor and control temperature and pressure. New safety features that would not allow the lid to be opened when the unit was under pressure were incorporated into the designs. The Second Generation of electric pressure-cookers came out in the mid-90s, and featured convenient functions such as digital presets, delayed cooking, automatic warm and hold functions, and a ‘Leaky Lid” alarm that detects when the valve is open, or the seal is not working, and shuts itself off and sounds an alarm. The Third Generation of electric pressure cookers feature a microprocessor, which means each unit has a little computer but into it. Using highly sensitive digital sensors, these unit can perform all kinds of complicated cooking operations with the touch of a button. For example, many have setting for ‘Multi-Grains’, which means raw grain can be added to the cooker, and it will hold it for soaking at a specified temperature, before heating up to cooking temperatures.
They can be set for delayed cooking, and warming, which means that a person can load it, specify a time to start cooking, and then the unit will keep the food warm for up to two days, depending on the unit. So, you can load it in the morning, go to work and have dinner ready when you get home. The only thing it won’t do it put it on the plate for you. Anyone can use these units. Cooking doesn’t get any simpler than this.
All three types of electric pressure cookers are available, and what type you use just depends on how much hands-on control you want. Some of us prefer a little more, and some less. It’s your choice. Many newer models, like the Wolfgang Puck Bistro Elite, have some features of all three types. The quality of these pressure cookers varies by manufactures, and runs the complete range from semi-professional quality, to cheap junk. Many will tell you to avoid electric pressure cookers because they are unreliable and are plagued with problems (before writing this book, I myself was one of these detractors...), but this is just because the market is still flooded with very cheap, poorly-made products. You’re better off sticking to proven brands such as Presto, Cuisinart, Fagor, Emeril, Wolfgang Puck, Nesco, Manttra, etc...Avoid off-brand, or discount units. A high-quality modern electric pressure cooker is an outstanding appliance, safe, reliable, and a very good addition to any kitchen.