We have been pressure cooker fanatics for years. We have stood on soap boxes promoting their efficiency and necessity in the kitchen. In Ideas in Food: Great Recipes and Why They Work, we had the chapter on pressure cooking cut out. Thankfully, Aki was able to weave much of the material back into the book. Most of the material she integrated revolved around using the pressure cooker for cooking broths. In Maximum Flavor: Recipes That Will Change The Way You Cook, we dove back into pressure cooking. A few examples of its functionality, at the time, were our pork belly and beans and sunflower seed risotto.
But as I have looked at pressure cooking and the results, I noticed a pattern. A pattern that made the reasoning for utilizing it in a broth chapter and where foods cooked together could mask the final results. Pressure cooking allows for the great extraction of flavor. Yes, it allows for the tenderization of meats, vegetables, grains, and more. But as a whole, it is detrimental to cook meats as a fast braise in the cooker. The meats become tender and, for the most part, flavorless. Even utilizing the idea of a double boiler, the end result is a concentrated meat extract, not a better braised meat. Today, our pressure cooker is now our broth maker.
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