The Family Table: Under pressure
If I invested based on the products I use most, I would own stock in slow cookers, glass canning jars and soup ladles.
Anyone who regularly reads this column knows my slow cookers are like the fourth, fifth and sixth children in our home.
Because I don’t always have time to stand at the stove and tend to dishes, I use them for everything I can.
Among my favorite uses for it is a big pot of stock. The low and slow cooking — sometimes 15 or 20 continuous hours — produces a stock that extracts as much as it can from the bones and vegetable scraps I use.
As often as I can, I try to avoid using boxed/canned broths and stocks. They are, in my view, a convenience item … and with that convenience there is typically a price. In this case, it’s sodium.
With a family history of high blood pressure, I watch my sodium intake pretty closely. Homemade stock means I can control how much extra salt gets added to the finished product.
The one drawback of slow cooker stock is that I have to think about it the day before if I want to make a soup or stew with it.
A couple years ago, my mom gave us an electric pressure cooker for Christmas. Frankly, I was afraid to use it, and so it sat in the box downstairs until this past weekend.
Mike and I drug it out Saturday morning, figuring since there were no kids in the house, we could take our time to figure it out. I did my research online, learning about natural vs. quick pressure release, looking at cooking times, and the best things to make in the eight quart cooker.
One I came upon again and again were stocks. The claim: they could be made in an hour.
“Skeptical” doesn’t adequately cover how I felt about the pressure cooker’s ability to produce a stock in 60 minutes.
“Absolutely wrong” is what I was.
Using a compilation of recipes I found online, I made a stock with oxtail, marrow bone and vegetables that was as good as my 15-hour slow cooker broth, and yielded nearly the same amount of finished product.
The 60 minutes, however, was a bit of a lie.
Yes, it cooked that long … once it came up to pressure. That process took about 25 minutes, and there was another 30 minutes or so on the end to let the cooker naturally depressurize. When I tried to rush that process by using the release valve, I found that stock sputtered through making a mess of my countertop.
Still, I was able to make stock from start to finish in about 2 hours. Even at the three batches I made this weekend, I still spent less time doing it than if I’d made one in the slow cooker.
My freezer is stocked with traditional beef and spiced pho stock. We rounded out the weekend making a chicken chili in 12 minutes, tender turkey meatballs and sauce in about 20 minutes, and country beef ribs in about 40 minutes.
This weekend, I’m going to tackle chicken and vegetable stocks to round out my stash.
Keep an eye on this column for pressure cooker recipes as I start developing them. What are your favorite uses for the pressure cooker? Let me know by emailng me directly: jgarofalo@heraldstandard.com.
Jennifer Harr is the 蘑菇视频’s news managing editor. 蘑菇视频 her at jharr@heraldstandard.com or follow her on Twitter @HSJenHarr.