Pressure cooker!

[ilai]

I stewed a large pot of pork, eggs, tofu, and mushrooms (滷肉、蛋、豆腐、香菇) yesterday afternoon, and filled my kitchen with the aroma of five-spice powder. The recipe I used called for a pressure cooker, but since I did not have one, I just let the stew sit for about three hours. While waiting, I looked online and found some $45 pressure cookers on Amazon. Now I'm really tempted to get a pressure cooker for yummy stews like this, which gets me an entire week's worth of lunches and dinners.

Or maybe a crockpot, whichever one is actually more useful.

Comments

[schnerf.livejournal.com]

(this is ploamphed usurping schnerf's computer.)

Pressure cooker works on the principle that when you increase the pressure, the boiling point for water will also rise. So in a pressure cooker you can bring the temperature of a water-logged object to much higher than it would in a normal pot. Furthermore, pressure cookers are typically air-tight, so you have yummy steam action gently massaging the food. Together they make quicker and more even heating of food in less time. And meat tends to come out tender and ready to fall apart.

There are also allegedly ways to making barbeque (think jerk pork, where the meat is nice and easy to tear) in a pressure cooker, but I've never actually looked for recipes as such.

Personally, I don't find much use for the pressure cooker. I really don't mind slow-cooking my food in a crock-pot.