Scroll through Pinterest or your favorite food blog and you're bound to see photos of sumptuous stews, braised meats, and cheesy casseroles that were all magically made by dumping a ton of delicious ingredients into an electric pot, plugging the cooking device into an outlet, and letting the ingredients do their thing for 6 to 8 hours.
The slow cooker is hot right now and the trend doesn't seem to be losing steam.
But recently, I've fallen in love with the slow cooker's centuries-old ancestor: the pressure cooker.
Like the slow cooker, the pressure cooker allows you to throw a bunch of ingredients together, pop a lid on top, sit back, relax, and end up with a delicious concoction. Both devices do a great job of tenderizing meat, cooking beans, and making flavorful food. The pressure cooker, however, has one major advantage: It cooks food in about a third of the time that a slow cooker would take to do the same job.
Take carnitas. In a slow cooker it'll take almost a full day to prepare pork shoulder that's fully cooked and easily pulls apart. The same dish is ready in just over an hour in a pressure cooker — and it comes out just as tasty.
It took me some time to warm up to my pressure cooker. The pot was re-gifted to me by a close friend and for a while, I had no clue what to do with it.
A pressure cooker looks similar to a conventional kitchen pot, with a lid that seals airtight. When the cooker heats up, it produces a ton a steam that is locked into the pot. The pressure inside raises the boiling point of the water or whatever liquid you're cooking your food in. This increases the temperature, shrinking the amount of time it takes for food to cook as a result. Here's a great video that explains the science behind pressure cookers.
The cooking device is especially handy when making food at high altitudes, where the low air pressure causes cooking times to increase. It also consumes a lot less energy than other conventional food preparation methods because of the decreased cooking time.
And pressure cookers are cheap. You can buy a basic stove-top pressure cooker for less than $50, though the programmable electric models are a bit more expensive.
Pressure cookers aren't exactly a modern kitchen innovation. They actually date back to the 1600s. Slow cookers, on the other hand, came about in the 20th century.
So far I've only made braised short rib and carnitas in my pressure cooker. Both were a success. For the carnitas, we simply browned cubes of pork butt in the pot, then added jalapeño, serrano, and poblano peppers, a roughly chopped onion, some cloves of garlic, spices, and bison broth. You can find the recipe here.
We served up the pork on tacos and in rice bowls, accompanied by guacamole, sour cream, and cheese. We even tossed some leftovers on top of a homemade pizza.
Though I haven't experimented with much beyond meat, you can make almost anything in a pressure cooker, from curry, which cooks in 20 minutes, to black beans, which cook in 35 minutes.
There's just one big downside: the inability to taste your food as it cooks. I'm the kind of amateur chef that often doesn't follow recipes and instead adds ingredients based on what I think the dish needs. With a pressure cooker, you can't really taste the dish until the very end, since the lid needs to remain shut.
But if time and convenience are your priority, I recommend trying a pressure cooker.
