Blasphemy!!

[Cheef]

Exactly what we thought Huskee My wife and I just stumbled onto it and it was more or less an impulse buy.
When I get home there is an ox tail recipe I am really wanting to try.
Oxtail done right is flavorful beyond description.
2 things in this world my wife refuses to cook
Oxtail, and liver and onions. I love them both. I will admit I kind of gag a little while preparing the liver but the results are worth the trauma!!

[martybartram]

Oh no! I just had a flashback to oxtail and sudsa in a country I have blanked from my mind in Africa

[Cheef]

@fzxdoc so funny you mention your memories of your Grandmother using a pressure cooker.
When I was just a kid in the early 60's my Grandma Annie was a pressure cooking woman.
That pressure cooker was always hissing in her farm house kitchen. Scared the bejesus out of all of us cousins at Christmas time because EVERY one with in 50 miles was telling the story of her blowing one up.
It must have been kind of spectacular because--well everyone knew about it.
I'll never forget all the cousins making it a special point to stay out of the kitchen for fear of Grandma Annie setting off another explosion. When we did make a trip through the kitchen it was as fast as we could make it happen and gone. She would always warn us the pressure cooker is running and scatter us like flies. I think she used it as a crowd control method because back then there would be 40 or 50 people in the old farm house at Christmas.
Those old women worked HARD at family. She pressure cooked, and pressure canned a 2 acre vegetable garden. Us kids were the summer time transient garden labor. All the cousins took a week and WORKED because the garden was serious business back then. Pay was a shiney new penny and room and board. Pretty good deal considering Grandma Annies cooking skills. She passed over 50 years ago and I still miss her cooking and still enjoy thinking about her and talking about her.

[fzxdoc]

What a lovely story about a great woman, Cheef . I miss my grandma too. Hard-working didn't begin to describe her. As I said, every time I use my pressure cooker I think of her (and in-between times too!)

[TheMeatGuyJapan]

Ok... so I remember Mom using her stove-top pressure cooker. Stewed chicken in like 10 minutes... yes, please. This thread has inspired me to look into new versions of the old rattle-pot.

I am currently looking at the Instant Pot Smart... because Bluetooth. When reading the review of it on hippressurecooking.com I noticed a temperature and time chart for... Sous Vide!?!

Question: Has anyone used a pressure cooker for Sous Vide cooking? What did you think? I've had a wi-fi Sous Vide device on pre-order for months from Nomiku. It is likely going to be months before they get around to making mine (it was a KickStarter thing and I got in late) and I've been considering cancelling my order. This may have pushed me over that edge.

-Jim

>Has anyone used a pressure cooker for Sous Vide cooking?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the mechanics here. But the way a pressure cooker works is by holding in moisture, thereby increasing the pressure inside the vessel, which drives up the boiling point of water, allowing food to be cooked at a much higher temperature than normal. That's why it cooks so fast. You could certainly put vacuum packed meat into a pressure cooker, but you can't control the temperature, most pressure cookers only have one or two settings and they cook at whatever is the boiling point of water at however many atmospheres of pressure they contain. A lot vacuum pack bags would break down at those temperatures. The bags we use are all suitable for sous vide, but they are only rated for a little over 100C on their spec sheets.

Some electric pressure cookers also double as slow cookers, in which case they don't actually increase the pressure. You could sous vide in one of those, but they likely won't have the precise temperature control of a dedicated sous vide cooker. Fine if you are doing long cooks at high temps, but not so good if you are prepping steaks and are shooting for medium rare every time.

[jholmgren]

Good point - it actually uses the 'valve open' setting, so no pressure. Not sure how precise it is but it does claim to have quite a range of temperatures available.

[TheMeatGuyJapan]

My best selling item in Japan is a 1 kg cut of Australian striploin that we sell chilled. We sell hundreds per week. Sometimes the customer isn't home to recieve it, or they change their mind in transit, or they don't like it. So this is also my most returned item. Returns don't go back into inventory, they go into a box in the freezer that is for me or gets dispersed to staff once it gets full. So I have a lot of these and I need some variety other than roast or steaks. I'll put 3 or 4 of them, frozen, into the pressure cooker with a bunch of salt, an onion, a clove of garlic, and just a splash of liquid. In 45 minutes I have shredded beef and it's awesome. I could live without my pressure cooker, but life would be less nice.

[Huskee]

Exactly. And what we have found is once out of the pressure cooker Chicken and brauts probably a lot of other meats benefit from a few minutes over an open flame--I e grill.

Cheef Most definitely! My wife, out of convenience in certain circumstances, will make pulled pork in the crock pot while we're gone. When I get back I will shred the butts into the pulled pork, stir in some rub, and place shallow pie pans of it in my smoker and smoke it ex post facto. It works! As long as the meat isn't dry as a bone, you get your convenient cooking method plus the authentic grilled/smoked taste.

[Dr ROK]

Just a heads up for Apple users.
My wife discovered a new recipe app that she REALLY likes. It allows her to snap a picture of her old well used paper/book recipes and put them into the app. She has always looked for an electronic app that would allow her to quickly add her old 4H/Church recipes without typing them in.
Here's a link if anyone is interested.

http://app.organizeat.com/

You can also do this with Evernote and the "Scannable" extension. It even makes the document searchable, even if it's hand written. I love Evernote!

[LangInGibsonia]

fzxdoc I bought the wire basket you recommended. I just used it to make shrimp stock for a bouillabaisse I'm making tonight. What a handy little tool!! Thanks for the suggestion.

[fzxdoc]

Great idea for shrimp stock, LangInGibsonia ! Haven't tried that in my Instant Pot as yet.

And yes, I love that wire basket. Thank heavens the handles were not soldered on too snugly. They popped right off even with my puny wrist action and a pair of pliers. It fits the Instant Pot insert like it was made for it.

Kathryn

[Nieuport]

LangInGibsonia , can you provide more details about your frozen venison technigue? Did you brown first? I have several roast in the freezer and this sounds like a great way to cook them.

[LangInGibsonia]

Nieuport To be honest, I don't remember exactly how I made it. A lot of the things I make I can never exactly replicate because I just kind of throw stuff together. If I were to make something like it right now I would sauté some onions and garlic with salt and pepper, add two top sirloin roasts (the ones shaped like a football) pour in a jar of fire roasted tomatoes a couple of cups of good beef stock and some herbs (probably some combination thyme, rosemary or herbs de provance) and lock on the lid. The cook time chart for my electric cooker says small beef roasts take 25 to 30 minutes under pressure so I added a couple minutes to account for them being frozen. Once its done I'd take out just the roast leaving all the other chunky stuff behind and shred it up to put on sandwiches. Other options would be to add pasta, rice or barley to the pot and eat it like a soup. Or add potatoes and flour slurry and make a stew. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud now. But that's how I cook. I rarely use a recipe in the kitchen.

If you try to make this remember, the timing I used is for an electric pressure cooker. If you are using stovetop it will be a few minutes shorter because they use higher pressure than electrics. Also, start timing when the pot comes to full pressure, not when you start to heat it.

Hope that helped.

[Nieuport]

Thanks a lot, I'll give it a try.

[Mickeylou5]

I got my son one for Christmas. It was a couple of weeks before he got around to trying it but when he did I got a text message that read:

Mom,
We're pressure cookers made by angels?


I got a good laugh out of that and he loves it!

[ribeyeguy]

You know, the more I read here the more I realize just how ignorant I am. My wife has a pressure cooker that she uses a few times a year and it always puts out good food. But, the thing has about a hundred buttons which I'm assuming are temperature setting, time settings, etc. She tried to show me how to use it once but her fingers were flying over the keypad like a teenager sending a text message so I gave up.

[Strat50]

I love both my pressure cookers. Very versatile, as I use our 8 quart for regular meals, and our 20(?)quart for canning. They are a secret weapon for most types of braising. That being said, you can use canning methods to do some killer BBQ sides with a pressure cooker. You can also dry smoke meat till done, and almost like jerky(in other words, screw ups! lol), pack 'em in small jars, add a bit of stock, then can per instructions(get these from the USDA extension service). This will make fresh tasting pulled pork, etc., all day long. The possibilities are endless.

[TrickyDick]

I have a ?6 quart stainless fagor induction compatible stove top pressure cooker and every time I use it something scorches!!! I tried the good eats pressure cooker chili recipe.. Twice... Scorched mess into the trash!! What am I doing wrong? I'm tempted to buy the breville electric model which got good reviews by serious eats/Kenji. Second time I made the chili recipe I was careful to not use much power to avoid over heating the bottom. I think it's something about sugar in the tomato sauce and tortilla chips that scorch? I mean it took a week to clean it

[Potkettleblack]

Modernist Cuisine at Home has many pressure cooker recipes... I made an insanely good pork belly adobo in it... super stinky yet delicious and luscious like few things I've ever eaten.