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Close, bring up to high pressure and immediately remove from the heat. In an electric pressure cooker this means programming 0 minutes. The publishing industry until very recently has seemed to agree – there is a real dearth of decent books on the subject, though there are a huge number on slow cookers – why? When I started using a pressure cooker, I found myself reliant on the accompanying recipe booklet, an old Marguerite Patten from the 1970s which is unsurprisingly very out of date, and an American title by Laura Sass, Pressure Perfect, which is great if you can be faffed with all the cup measurements and is unsurprisingly good on beans. More recent is Australian Suzanne Gibbs' recent book which has some very fresh tasting dishes, such as this version of a tagine here. However, I am more excited by the fact that Grub Street have recognised that pressure cookers are woefully under represented, and have therefore commissioned Marguerite Patten to update her 1970s book to reflect modern eating habits – the book will focus more on pulses, grains, stews and soups and will be released as one of the Basic Basics Handbooks sometime in April.
Dried beans last for ever. According to Josiah Meldrum, although Hodmedod’s aims to sell pulses in the year of harvest, they won’t go off. However ‘the starch transforms, getting more and more resistant starch in the beans as they age… so they take longer and longer to cook’. Catherine Phipps agrees, adding that when using a pressure cooker, ‘the older the beans, the harder it is to get them to cook through properly without them collapsing’. It seems mould can happen above all when using greaseproof paper and foil or materials that are not very clean, also when the pudding hasn't been stored when totally cool and dry.
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With a pressure cooker, there’s hardly any evaporation, hardly any steam being released into the kitchen and, with electric pressure cookers, no babysitting involved so you can just leave it to do its thing from beginning to end. When to pressure cook it Heat a ladle full of vodka over a flame or in a small saucepan. Pour it over the pudding. Turn down the lights. Sit and watch it burn. The high alcohol content means that, as long as the pudding is stored properly, it can keep for a long time. Also step in my partner Vincenzo, who, before meeting me, had been devoted to his pressure cooker. I asked why he hadn’t bought one for us, or encouraged me to use one, to overcome my fear. He replied that he had, on various occasions, and that I was stubborn. That night, I soaked 500g borlotti beans. The next morning, we drove to his parents to borrow their pressure cooker (which I must note is an Italian model, and slightly different from those Phipps writes about, so with different timings, but the inspiration was all her).
The blurb before the actual recipe is essential reading and it's laid out that way precisely so that you get all the information you need before you dive in. Adding bicarbonate of soda to bean cooking water helps them soften. When it comes to softening beans, (a little) bicarb is good, sugar and acid are bad. A small amount of bicarb definitely speeds up cooking, but don’t add too much or it will make the beans taste soapy. Salt also seems to speed up cooking slightly, and it’s great for flavour. Because sugar and acid are bad news for cooking beans, when making beans in tomato sauce, don’t add tomatoes (which are sweet and sour) until the beans are well and truly soft. The upside is that the tomatoes should stop the beans collapsing further. If you are of a certain age, you probably have some scary memories of pressure cookers. They had monstrous reputations – ferocious, steam belching geysers, they hissed and rattled away ominously on the stove, threatening to explode if not carefully attended and able to administer nasty scalds if not treated with properly insulated kid gloves. So it's hardly surprising that they are viewed by many as something to be handled with extreme caution at best, dangerous and to be avoided at worst. Simply tip the pulses into a pan and cover with water by about 5cm (add salt or bicarb if you like), then leave overnight. If you don’t have time for that, just bring the pan straight to the boil. Boil for one minute, then cover and leave to soak for an hour, before continuing with the recipe. Heat the olive oil in the pressure cooker. Add the bacon/pancetta and fry until crisp, then set aside. Toss the beef in the flour and mustard powder and season well with salt and pepper. Sear over a high heat in the pressure cooker pan until brown all over. Set aside.Melt together sugar, butter and alcohol. You can add a bit of cream if you want a rich creamy one but Catherine loves the sugar and butter.
Suet: Catherine doesn’t advise vegetarian suet as it has palm oil. You get a much softer crumb if you use butter. She thinks it could be done with coconut oil, one to test! Or take it out of the pudding basing and wrap it, just make sure it has cooled down fully before you wrap it. And use very clean materials. This humdrum tool of grandmother's thrifty cooking is resurrected with an amazing amount of glamour' - The Times
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It is more effective than soaking large amounts of fruit in the tiny amounts of liquid most recipes call for. There are lidded pudding basins that are metallic and plastic pudding basins, I don't really trust the latter as the lids have been known to warp under pressure. The Pressure Cooker Bible from the Pressure Cooker Queen… Wonderful!!!' - Si King, The Hairy Bikers
Phipps's exceptional book shows that the pressure cooker has moved far beyond its spluttering, drab 1970s incarnation' - The Sunday Times If you’re well past that (me too), the good news is that starting later still reaps rewards: switching to an optimal diet at 60 could add eight years, and even making the change at 80 could mean an extra three years on your life expectancy. For the filling. If your lamb is fatty and you’d like to remove some of it, fry it in a pan until browned and a lot of fat has rendered out. Drain off the fat and set the mince aside.You can use any recipe you like for Christmas Pudding, they all steam in the same way - just use the timing guide below for the different sizes of pudding basins. Jump to: The pressure cooker is the number one gadget for people who want to slice huge chunks off the cooking time of meat, pulses and sauces. From ribs that fall off the bone, to stew, casserole or braised meat, a pressure cooker can achieve great results in under an hour. Pasta and rice can be made from scratch in less than 10 minutes; thrifty cooks can tenderise flavoursome cheap cuts in just 20 minutes and pulses can be cooked without having to soak them. Speed isn't the only advantage of pressure cookers - they also preserve nutrients and vitamins, as well as being a more economical way to cook. Please note that this post is long so that you have every single detail you might need in one place as every year there are a lot of questions about how to pressure cook a Christmas Pudding and I don't want to be sending you around in circles. Traditionally, Christmas puddings are boiled on the stovetop for 8 hours, continuously releasing steam into your kitchen and having to keep an eye on the water level.
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