Do you remember that song by David Bowie and Queen? It came out in 1981 and spent 10 weeks on the charts before reaching number 1. About that time, I had landed my first job: an entry level sales position which demanded three consecutive months of achieving quota or you were out on your ass, along with your navy skirt suit, sensible pumps and shiny new leather briefcase. Whenever I was feeling the down draft from the corner office about meeting my numbers, I found myself humming it under my breath, in an endless loop. Apparently, I was actually managing my stress without knowing it: according to Lifehacker.com, humming a tune decreases anxiety and is a coping mechanism for situations like having someone in authority breathing down your neck. Or since we were in the 80’s, the collar of your white silk blouse with red dicky tie!
But I digress. I am no longer marching to someone else’s tune, but I have the luxury of creating my own set of pressures. I live in San Miguel de Allende Mexico, where the air is sweet, the hummingbirds dart among the flowers, and the meat is as tough as an old leather boot. I go to restaurants armed with a package of various dental devices to remove the sinew and stringy bits. The saving grace is that meat is rarely expensive: but how to turn all of those cheap cuts of shank, rib and shoulder roast into something not only edible, but tender and delicious?
I was inspired by an episode of Canadian Chef Michael Smiths’s cooking show, where he demonstrated the difference in results between a braising a beef stew for 2 hours in a traditional dutch oven, for 8 hours in a slow cooker and for 30 minutes in a pressure cooker. From my perspective, even though I am in no hurry, I liked the look of the pressure cooker result better: the carrots and onions looked brighter, and had retained more of their original colour and texture and the meat was still brown and appetizing. Both the oven and the slow cooker results were pronounced tasty and tender, but the colour of the meat was tending to coal and the vegetables looked anemic and mushy. Also in the pressure cooker’s favour was the use of gas, which is relatively cheap here in Mexico, versus electricity, which is wildly expensive. Which is to say, about the same as in Ontario, thanks to Dalton McGinty’s wasteful and misguided green energy policies.
But I digress. Since my esposo has been on an energy conservation crusade here, I thought that there might be merit in trying out the technology. If you are interested in all of the very good reasons to use a pressure cooker, the full technical and chemical explanation is at www.foodrenegade.com/pressure-cooking-healthy. The short answer is simply common sense: less cooking time, more nutrients, less liquid, more nutrients. And due to those 2 factors, plus the nature of cooking under fast high heat, more intense flavour. And you get “denatured” proteins without the hours of cooking time (denatured is a fancy chemical word for “broken down”, which is how you get from shoe leather to succulent, regardless of the process you use. )
CHEFS ARE EMBRACING a green technology that makes cooking faster, flavors more intense, braised meats more tender, stocks richer, whole grains easier to handle and root vegetables more flavorful. The good news for home cooks: This transformational piece of equipment is not a pricey Pacojet nor a complex sous-vide setup. It’s a common, relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use pressure cooker. WSJ January 18, 2013
Pressure cookers are used by chefs but rarely on TV. Heston Blumenthal writes about them regularly, heaping praise on them for their stock making abilities, believing it’s the best method not just for flavour (he raves about the “depth and complexity” you can achieve) but for clarity too. Guardian, July 7 2010