Under Pressure…

Pressure on veggies, pressure on meats! Da da da… Ok, apologies to David Bowie and Queen for shamelessly riffing on their song, but I can’t ever pass up a good pun! After wrapping my second Pioneer Woman recipe collection several weeks ago, I put my next cooking project up to a vote; should I continue with another Ree Drummond book, the second Magnolia Table volume by Joanna Gaines, Good Eats Vol 2 by Alton Brown, or The Step-by-Step Instant Pot Cookbook by the decidedly NON-chef, Jeffrey Eisner. Color me surprised when the latter was the landslide winner among my esteemed voters (275 Facebook friends and acquaintances.) Those who weighed in were most interested in watching my trial by fire (or pressure, as the case may be) of learning to use my Instant Pot for more than just boiling eggs. P.S., if all you ever do is boil eggs in this thing, it’s still worth the investment!

My main goals for writing this blog are three-fold: 1) Learn new recipes that I otherwise might never try; 2) Make observations and reviews of aforementioned recipes for future improvement, and/or complete deletion from my brain if they just don’t do it for me; and 3) To hopefully inform or teach others through my own stratospheric successes, abysmal failures, bloopers, and happy accidents. As a perpetual student of the culinary arts, I don’t discriminate between learning the most basic cooking methods and trends to the most classical approaches to high-end cuisine. I want to know it ALL. Which brings me to the star of my current project book, the Instant Pot. Or Insta-Pot. Or simply “the IP” as those in the many Facebook groups dedicated to pressure-cookery recipe sharing affectionately call this modern marvel of kitchen technology. I say “modern” as a bit of a joke, because the first pressure cooker was actually invented in 1689. It became popular for household cooking in the early 20th century, due to its ability to cook foods up to 90% faster than traditional stovetop or oven methods! However, old pressure cookers also had a tendency explode, spewing liquid-hot magma all over the kitchen and the cooks… which is pretty much my worst kitchen fear. I don’t seem to be alone in this, since many of my voters expressed the desire to learn how to properly use their IP because they are afraid of the thing. Can I get an amen?

I purchased my 6-qt IP at the tail-end of the multi-cooker craze which occurred around 2017. As with most folks who snapped up one of these on Amazon Prime Day or were gifted an IP during the holidays, mine spent a good deal of time gathering dust, still inside the box. It was big. It was bulky. It scared the poop out of me. I’d previously owned a lower-quality, manual, Bed Bath and Beyond pressure cooker that I used precisely one time to create Alton Brown’s Beef & Barley soup (which by the way is absolutely delicious), and I kid you not, after releasing the pressure with a long handled wooden spoon, I bounded out of the kitchen with the swiftness of a jackrabbit on a date. The screeching, spitting hiss of steam escaping is the stuff of nightmares. Afterward that old pressure cooker lived a solitary existence in a dark cabinet until I Marie Kondo’d it away as something that did not “spark joy”. So why the heck did I sign up for more of this torture by buying an IP years later? Peer…pressure. Ok, I wasn’t even trying for a pun that time, it just happened! And it’s true; one of my closest friends had purchased an IP and extolled its virtues several times, eventually purchasing multiples so she could have one for human food preparation and additional ones to make healthy, homemade pet foods for her four lucky fur-babies. Prodded by her example and many, many recipe web searches, I finally used my IP to make rice and chicken (fairly successfully) months after I purchased it. Over the intervening years, I learned how to use it to make the PERFECT hard boiled eggs, and even more complicated things like tender pork spare ribs and a couple stews and pasta dishes. The Instant Pot never gained status as my go-to method of cooking, but it earned a respectable spot on my appliance shelf and got to come out to play dozens of times per year. I give you this brief personal history simply to illustrate my own experience level as I launch into the recipes from The Step-by-Step Instant Pot Cookbook.

Finally, what you have all been waiting for: the food! I numbered these photos wrong and it’s a hassle to fix it now, so let’s just pretend the first thing I made was Swedish Meatballs. When I prepared this, I was in the same boat as many families these days: hungry, with very little time available for cooking a real dinner. With the siren song of take-out ringing in my ears, I drowned the music out by using a huge time saver in the form of frozen Italian meatballs. My good buddy Jeff (the author) says that’s totally fine, and assured me the cook time would remain the same, so I skipped the IKEA-inspired meatballs that include no fewer than thirteen ingredients. I’m sure they are delicious, and I’m sure at some point I’ll make those. Today is not that day. The meatballs utilized the little foldable lifting rack that comes standard as part of the IP starter kit, and called for 10 minutes of cooking followed by 5 minutes NR, then QR (more on this momentarily.) The function of the rack is to keep food directly off the surface of the pot and let liquid (and therefore, steam) cook the it. Often water is the base used to create steam, but this recipe calls for beef broth, which is later used to make the gravy. One of the first things a new user learns is the pressure-cooking community lingo, such as “QR” and “NR”, which stand for Quick Release and Natural Release, respectively. The first means you’ll want to grab that long handled wooden spoon to flip the pressure gauge open after manually cooking for a prescribed time. Don’t do this with your fingers, because you risk a nasty steam burn if you aren’t quick enough snatching your hand back. Natural Release is a kinder, gentler form of letting the steam out by allowing the internal temperature to come down a bit before flipping that valve open. After 5-10 minutes, the pot only gasps, rather than screaming the sound of a dying goat. I cannot overstate how startling and nerve-wracking the cooking noises are to a novice using the IP. Trust me when I tell you they are normal and means you have done everything right! Back to this recipe; meatballs – good, sauce – good (you use gravy mix, heavy cream, and corn starch, so no great mystery there) but the one disappointment I had is that I had to dirty a second pot to boil my noodles. I prefer my IP recipes to be true “One Pot Wonders”. This gets 8 out of 10 for ease of use and tastiness.

One of the best things about the arrangement of this cookbook is that it was created by a REAL PERSON. Not a professional chef; not a culinary school instructor; not your Great-Grandma Gertrude whose recipes included things like Oleo or arrowroot. If I open my fridge and find a surplus of lackluster carrots, I can look up “carrot” in the index and find seven ideas to use them up. If I know I am in the mood for a hearty stew, there is a chapter dedicated to just that. Literally anything I have on-hand I have been able to find a recipe to utilize it in this book. For my (real) first foray into this project I had a pile of chicken that I had thawed without anything inspiring in mind. Enter Chicken and Dumplings. Now, I have eaten this simple meal on several occasions. I’ve had versions I didn’t much care for with somewhat slimy dumplings, and versions which called for store-bought biscuits to be cut into chunks to serve as dumplings. Never before had I actually MADE a dumpling. I didn’t even really know what it was! No great surprise, it’s basically a biscuit, though somewhat flatter and almost looked like pie dough, but once it was dropped into the simmering stew of celery, carrots, onions and chicken, they puffed up nicely. Between the delicious mix of spices and the comforting doughy goodness, this recipe was a hands-down winner for everyone who tried it. On the plus side it makes your house smell amazing too! 9 out of 10 for this recipe; the only thing docking it is that it does take an hour, all told, and you make a bit of a mess rolling the dumpling dough.

Ahh, one of my husband’s faves: Spaghetti Carbonara. This is a frequent restaurant order when we go out, and I have tested out a couple different versions at home over the years. All have been decent, none have become “my” recipe. This one is a contender. In the picture it was hard to capture the essence of this dish, which was creamy, tender, and altogether satisfying. It started out by using the “Sauté” button on the IP as opposed to the most oft-used button, “Manual or Pressure Cook” (only used when the lid is on.) When the pot was screaming hot with olive oil, I added nearly a pound of bacon, far more economical than an equal amount of pancetta. Once crispy, I removed the bacon and sautéed onions and garlic in the drippings, before pouring in some white wine (or chicken broth) to deglaze the yummy bits sticking to the pan. Then in went dry pasta, broken in half to fit beneath the surface of the liquid. Slap on the lid, cook for eight minutes, and by the time you QR the steam, it’s time to add in a mixture of eggs, Parmesan and salt along with butter and cream. Are your arteries hardening yet? Don’t worry, surely there is an Instant Pot Salad in here somewhere… No? Oh well, make this a splurge meal, and if it makes you feel better, do like I did and throw in some token frozen peas to at least get a green vegetable in there. You won’t regret it! 10 out of 10, for bacon!