Under Pressure? Cook Good Things Fast w/Pressure Cookers!

I’m pretty jazzed about my new pressure cooker(from Amazon). I had found another one at an Ace Hardware Store a few months ago, but it actually cost more than Amazon, and Amazon has free shipping on this item (even without “Amazon Prime”). My fingers have done the walking, and they can type pretty fast. So a new, stainless steel, 8-qt. pressure cooker is on its way to my house. Whoo hoo!

Stainless Steel Pressure Cooker

Most of the deli girls we hire are young and less experienced, but not for long. Soon they find out what all we can do with our pressure cookers. We cook up a lot of stuff quite efficiently. Like, fresh garbanzo beans for salads. No canned garbs for us- they can be a little slimy. Plus it’s a smaller carbon footprint to buy dry beans and cook your own. No one has to ship those puppies to the factory to get cooked, then truck ’em off in cans that include a bunch of water. (You know it’s way cooler to get dry beans, right?!)

But that’s just beans. We make awesome stock with the pressure cooker too. For a special treat, we get free-range chickens; after roasting ’em and eating the best parts, we put the carcass in the pressure cooker and end up with an excellent stock. Some might call it “bone broth”. Either way, the pressure cooker is the way to go.

We have a huge pressure cooker from our old catering days, when we cooked up a -5-gallon pressure cooker full of turkeys. Weekly! It made incredible stock. So when we invested recently in a quarter of a grass-fed cow, it was pretty easy to roast the bones, then throw ’em into the giant pressure cooker. Sweet.

It might take a little longer in a smaller pressure cooker, to process all those bones. But then, most people aren’t buying a quarter-cow at a time, right?

Have you considered investing in a pressure cooker? We got that giant one back in the eighties, and it’s still with us. We also bought a more new-fangled one, in the last ten years- it didn’t last as long. It had weird plastic parts that weren’t easily replaced. If you do get a pressure cooker, go with Presto- they’ve been around for years. My father-in-law had one he’d been using since the forties. We were still using it, some sixty years later! It was aluminum; we eventually replaced it with stainless steel. The aluminum pressure cooker is perfect for canning jars of garden goodies. But stainless steel is more ideal to cook in, especially acidic things like tomato. (Aluminum might leach out a bit, if acidic foods are cooked in the aluminum pot for too long.)

If you like to cook, or need to cook, and love to eat, you should get a pressure cooker. The one mentioned in the link above is the best price I’ve found, and I didn’t even have to drive around looking for it. It also comes in other sizes, but the 8-quart gives me a great value, more bang for the buck 🙂

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