Pressure cooker expose

That’s right just like ‘current affairs’ we’re going to get to the streets and find out once and for all what’s up with pressure cooking….

I hear you ask yourself what is pressure cooking. Is it…
(a) Cooking for your in laws for the first time
(b) Heating up your ration packs in a bunker in Iraq
(c) Trying to fry an egg whilst perched on a small ledge
(d) Cooking food in a high pressure vessel that allows you to cook at up to 70% quicker
(e) All of the above

If you answered at all then you where correct, just playing along makes you a winner in my world. But in the real world it was obviously (d), the humble pressure cooker its been around since medieval times but was first documented by French physicist Denis Papin in 1679 (side note, this was 300 years before I was born…coincidence? I think not!!!) he first invented it to cook food quicker and since then no one has found any other uses for it… so some might say Denis was right on the money!!

My first run in with this remarkably ugly device was on a wintery night in 1985 in a small steel works town in England, my mother was cooking dinner as per usual “but what was this” what looked like one of the heads of the cyber men from doctor who was releasing spurts of steam from its top. It was infact A PRESSURE COOKER…. Later that night I was eating a form of silverside, which as a child was not exciting, tasty or intriguing, ungrateful little bastard I was.

Lets skip many years as quite simply it would bore the tits of you, as well as incriminate myself in many ways…Bang its three weeks ago and my new cooking school received all its new toys, including pressure cookers. So I figured I’d better take one home and give one a test run before I charge people with the pleasure of my imparted knowledge.

Well wasn’t I surprised with how much I loved this new electric version, it still has a resemblance to a creature/robot/cyborg from Dr Who but it truly is slightly magically, not as magical as magnets which still baffle me to this day but more along the lines of a magic trick which can be explained really easily but is still very entertaining to watch.

Since my first experience of using it I have cooked mussamon curry, cannellini beans & veg, master stock, pork chin, chooks and osso bucco in it. All working superbly and dishes that used to take 4+ hours where done in 30 minutes, the only issue is that you have to try and gauge the exact seasoning and flavouring as you can’t tweak it until its finished which is fine but just different then you’d normally do.

In summery I recommend going out and buying said pressure cooker as it saves you tons of time and makes an amazing product.

Hope you have enjoyed the journey through the world of pressure cooking if you for some reason have not…then I hope your machine is faulty and blows up and burns you severely.