Friday, July 30, 2010

Pressure Cooker experiments

I am at the time of this writing having some fun with a vintage pressure cooker that my friend Jim Dreier found for me at a rummage sale. He and his wife Cindy are the consummate "rummage salers". They make it a part of their weekend event schedule and if I am looking for something I ask Jim if he could find it for me and he usually does. He found me a KitchenAid stand mixer and this pressure cooker. He's amazing. We have been friends since my 5th grade year in school and we hunt deer together and hang out at his grandparents' homestead in Toimi, MN, a place I call "Paradise in the North Woods". I digress. The cooker he found me was a Mirro-Matic Pressure Cooker and it is quite large. I tested it for pressure at 5 lbs, 10 lbs, and 15 lbs and it functioned perfectly. He paid $2.00 for it and it is excellent!
My first recipe is an adaptation of an Emeril LaGasse recipe for white beans; a Mexican quick meal consisting of Chorizo, white beans, Ancho chilies, Lime juice, Tequila, salt and pepper. I substituted Hot Italian Sausage and made it into meatballs about 1 1/2" in diameter. I had the rest of the ingredients and started at 10lbs for 45 minutes and then tested for doneness and taste. It was good but the beans were a little too hard so I put re-set the cooker at 15 lbs and cooked for another 15 minutes and that was the right amount of time.
The meatballs are very tender and the beans are just nicely cooked. Very tasty as well, I might add. I think this is going to be a fun way to cook. I am going to order a cookbook from my cookbook club featuring pressure cooker recipes and start to experiment. I will report my findings along the way and give you the recipes to try as well.
Cooking under pressure,
Tim

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