How Using A Pressure Cooker Changed My Life

Far too many writers, marketers, promoters and other spinsters use the “changed my life” formula when they have something to promote. As a result, we tend to get cynical whenever someone says something changed his life. Yeah, sure—and how much is your fee?

But this time, it is true. A cooking utensil I had overlooked for years really did a lot for me recently. I was afraid of bulking on a budget before and now I can cook lots of cheap, yet nourishing and even tasty meat thanks to it.

Why use a pressure cooker?

Some foods can be consumed easily, sometimes immediately. A pack of bananas can be opened just after you checked out. A good ol’ T-bone can be minimally dressed, thrown on hot oil, flipped once or two and eaten cheerfully. Many foods, however, need time or work before they are ready to consume.

This is where the pressure cooker comes in. Instead of, say, letting your beans marinate in hot water during two hours, you can cook them in 40 minutes—and they will be better cooked after 40 minutes in the cooker than after thrice this time in hot water.

If you like having ready-to-cook supplies in the fridge, which is especially convenient when you don’t have time or patience to cook or nobody else to do it, if you want a healthy, high-protein diet on a budget, or if you’re simply tempted by a bit of gastronomic originality—which is highly seductive when you pull a girl into your lair—the pressure cooker might become the secret kitchen weapon you wouldn’t have thought of.

I’d only add two caveats. First, if you are living as a nomad, a big and thick saucepan may add unnecessary weight to your bags. On the other hand, most nomads are rather poor and being able to buy and cook the cheapest cuts can also be handy.

Second, unless you buy a fancy glass pressure cooker, you won’t be able to see how it’s going inside when you are using it and must guess how much water is still in there. If you stop cooking too soon, you will have to start the pressurization again, and if you stop too late the food may end up completely burned. Don’t worry, measuring the fairest time comes quickly with experience. In any case, it is better to stop cooking before it’s ready and start the process again than having it all charred.

Cooking what’s hard to cook: pulled pork

Usually, the tastiest, easiest to cook animal parts are also the most expensive. To cook these you don’t need anything more than a classic pan. However, start exploring the cheapest meats available and what you’ll find are parts that need some work to be eaten.

Take, for example, pork shoulder. These bulky, yet cheap parts are commonly used to make pulled pork. Now you likely ate some pulled pork burger at least once in your life. Pubs serve them and sports fans love chomping on them while guzzling beer. But do you know how this tender, delicious pork is cooked?

Turning a piece of hard, dry meat into something that can be eaten without a knife takes time. Most pulled pork recipes out there say you should let your pork inside the oven for 6 to 10 hours before the meat pulls. The pressure cooker does this job much quicker: my first pulled pork was ready to eat in one hour and a half. Namely, one hour inside the cooker, then I gently pounded the meat to “pull” it, brushed it with a house-made sauce and let it half an hour in the oven.

This latter part was only so that the meat would absorb more sauce. Had I been in a hurry, the pork shoulder had already turned into a pulled pork after only one hour in the cooker and could have been consumed at this time—it would just have been a bit less tasty.

Turning a thick knuckle into golden brown pieces

Another example: pork knuckle. Just like the pork shoulder this part is cheap and bulky. Recipes say you need at least two hours in the oven to cook it properly. Actually, knuckles are so dense than even after 2 hours of patience, when the external parts are all deliciously grilled, the most internal parts are still not fully cooked.

As you’ll have guessed, a better way to cook pork knuckle—a rather nourishing food that gives for 4 to 6 hearty servings—is through a nice session of pressure cooker.

There are a number of recipes, mostly revolving around sweet-and-sour preparations. My favourite one is the pork knuckle with pineapple. For this one you will need:

  • A fine piece of pork knuckle (obviously)
  • Some stock
  • An onion
  • A pineapple
  • Bay leaves
  • Thyme
  • Butter
  • Salt and pepper

Start by washing the knuckle a bit. Peel the onion, cut it in two. Then put the entire, uncut knuckle, together with the stock, thyme, laurel, and the two parts of the onion into the pressure cooker. Let it cook for 45 minutes, starting to count when the vapour begins to escape from the top. (Make sure you have put enough stock or water inside the cooker.)

When the knuckle is getting cooked, peel the pineapple, cut it into thin pieces and disgorge them into a pan. Take their juice away, keep it in a glass, and let the pineapple pieces grill a bit. Do so with all pieces, in several times if necessary. Keep the grilled pieces apart.

Once the knuckle is properly cooked, take it away from the pressure cooker, cut it into pieces and brown them with butter on a frying pan. At the time all knuckle parts have become brown, add the pineapple pieces, the sauce that remains down the cooker, the pineapple juices and a bit more stock if necessary. Then you just have to let reduce until the liquid has turned into a sauce.

Trust me, it is tasty, even when you are not especially fond of sweet-and-sour recipes. I enjoy this one so much that my girlfriend asked me to stop doing it.

Eating offal

Now we’re venturing into the less usual. North Americans tend to have a stigma around offal meat. It is perceived as dirty or less desirable. The advantage of this is, offal pieces come usually much cheaper than even shoulders or knuckles. If you manage to get past the stigma, there are plenty of offal pieces you can feast on.

The supermarket near my place sells beef hearts. A single beef heart is 5.5-6 lbs. This makes for 6 to 12 servings, depending on the hunger and if you’re bulking. I tried to cook a beef heart without the pressure cooker, but then, even two hours and a half were not enough to do it properly. Only the pressure cooker managed to break the resistance of this thick, dense part. Note that beef hearts are so cheap that the mushrooms that come in this recipe are more expensive.

At this point, my stepmother—a seasoned practitioner of pressure cooking—made me find out that chicken feet could be eaten by humans, and that they were good, too. She lets entire chickens inside her pressure cooker, including the feet. I was a bit wary the first time, only to find out that these often thrown-away parts were actually good. Full of gristle, glucosamine and chondroitin, chicken feet can help those with chronic articulation problems. Do them in a stew or with some beans—and only serve them to girls you’ve already screwed if you don’t want to lose a potential notch.

Bon appétit!

Just like lightbulbs, food is usually deemed too trivial for paying attention. Ignoring the apparently trivial can be a mistake: acting locally on your surroundings does more for your life than advocating or arguing, and feeding well is a staple of living well. Pressure cooker use helped me to go Chris Pratt workout since I knew I could gorge on high-protein pulled pork or beef heart without breaking open the piggy bank. When you’ve got 4lbs of beef heart stew still left in the fridge, you know you can push a lot, get late at home and still go to bed unstressed.

Read Next: Why You Should Make Meals With A Slow-Cooker

43 thoughts on “How Using A Pressure Cooker Changed My Life”

  1. If pulled pork is hard for you to cook, you’re a fucking retard.
    The only way to fuck it up is to undercook it. Fortunately, it’s so fatty that it’s almost impossible to overcook. Oven, crock pot, smoker….all easy as fuck to cook pulled pork.

    1. Haha! Smoky! This shit is NOT food!
      In fact I am feeling ready to puke!
      – I suppose you can try to eat this garbage in combination with the burnt rice from last week’s advice.. but only if you want colon cancer!
      There is NO access to any Non-GMO fed -Hormone-free Pork products anywhere in the USA.
      -Did you know the majority of Pork comes from Arkansas?
      -That penned pigs live in run-off that builds up into open cesspools.. the contents of which are sprayed into the air?
      -That the stink of pig shit and bacteria permeates entire towns?!
      I am all for eating meat and dairy..
      ~but in this period of history you have to eat organic, lean, free-range and pure -with no hormones, antibiotics, or preservatives.
      Good luck finding such treasured food… and if you do have access to a quality farm it will cost plenty!
      Note- Almost every Food Article on ROK in 2018 so far is utter insanity!

  2. i have one and i can cook beef parts that are really hard to cook otherwise.
    These parts are cheaper and taste delicious when you know what to do with.
    Give me a pressure cooker, fry pan and a good knife, and i can make decent living grow from nowhere lol

  3. You don’t need pork to lift well. You need some common sense regarding true human nutrition. Come on, RoK, this is 2018, you can do better than this!

    1. Technically, you can keep eating chicken breasts, guzzling cheap whey, and that’s enough to gain weight. But eating chicken breasts every day for weeks if not months makes you insane. Adding a bit of food diversity with pork is much better. Also, pork knuckles with pineapple are a treat.

      1. Chicken breasts translates to fat, hormones and antibiotics. Most don’t know this in 2018, thinking they eat healthy. The saddest part is that each time a vegan guy like me shows up people that never tried a vegan diet before think they know better. Even when confrunted with science, they still don’t believe it. Well, I suppose someone has to sponsor big pharma and the entire medical industry. Best health to everyone!

        1. seriously what did you expect ? a vegan named soyboi coming here to lecture us in an indirect way .. what a joke!

        2. @Soyboi 100 grams of chicken breast has 62% daily value (DV) of protein, 5% DV of fat and 30% DV of vitamin B-6 along with lots of iron. As for antibiotics and hormones, selecting pieces of chicken from specific sources can easily mitigate that problem. You are an omnivore. Vegans and soyboi’s would’ve and have died off millions of years ago. The only reason your ass can survive today is because as a society has flourished enough for your skinny ass to survive.

  4. Big, big fan of heart. Chicken, duck, beef, most nutritious thing you can eat. Liver and sheep stomach can be good too- if you can get past the texture.
    I’ve heard good things about horse meat as well, but it seems it’s only readily available to eat in France. Pity.

      1. All the meat we get from stores is raised using hormones, no exception, the “organic” label is nothing but marketing…
        Unless you have a farm, or somebody you can trust has a farm, there’s no way to make sure you eat a good quality meat

      1. You must be type O blood. No I’m not a vampire but I can tell a person’s blood type just by their diet since I’ve read the blood type diet book by Dr D’Adamo. Type O’s metabolize and burn red meat like feul. People with type A blood thrive on vegs and white fish. B type is the “milk and honey” group that can tolerate dairy best. B is also a very common blood type with khazarian Ashki Jews – thus Israel nicknamed the land of “milk and honey”. The B type can be traced through migratory routes from Asia to EE and ground zero for the B type to be most commonly found is in the geographic area of old Khazaria. Not all B’s are Ashki Jews and vice versa, but it’s interesting how many Zionist Jews have come to perceive the world as their own big milking cow. . . Yep there’s more interesting factoids to be found here on ROK than you can poke a set of bar-b-que utinsils at.

    1. Bah..everyday there’s a new thing which causes cancer. One day they’ll say life by itself is a cause of cancer

  5. andre du pole you are often good i like some of your articles but this blog is so boring these days. Tumeric, cooking, no anger, good commenters banned and no willingness to shake up the world with out there stuff for a long time. This stuff is useful not interesting.
    i see that they are healthy for cooking dinner. great thats great. i am just trying to help man rok used to be out there shit man. We still respect Roosh as a real man and hope for the best

    1. .According to the blood type diet, frog is in the same category as pork and not a recommended staple food for any blood type. Like pork, it is a survival food at best (think longham as last resort food category).
      But I’ll admit frog legs are so incredibly yummy and slightly sweet like pork. It’s like the meat version of a twinkie snack cake. You can’t stop eating em.
      With frog, the only edible part is the hind legs. Leave the rest alone and pitch it in the bushes or the neighbor’s yard. It takes a lot of frogs to get a pound or two of hind legs and the meat is tender and lightly sweet white meat. They can be cooked without much added marinade or seasoning but a light dusting of seasoned flour makes them addictive like adding powdered sugar to a bare cake donut. Sautee in butter/olive oil. Cook quickly and lightly. Overcooking hardens the delicate sweet meat.

  6. Thanks for the article. I’ve recently become interested in pressure cooking myself. Pressure cookers were a common, visible tool in kitchens when I was growing up many decades ago.

  7. I agree on a pressure cooker. My mom had one and used it very often. When I was young, beef heart was a staple for the family (mom, dad, 2 boys, 1 girl) because it was cheap. Cooking butternut squash takes almost no time in a pressure cooker. She also had a garden and canned a ton of veggies, pickles, and jellies.
    My indispensables in the kitchen are my vacuum sealer and my sous vide cooker. Cut meat into portions, season them, seal them, and freeze them. When cooking time happens, set the temp on the sous vide and put the frozen meat in it. You can’t overcook the meat! On top of which, leaving it cook for an extended time helps tenderize the meat. My pressure cooker is second.

  8. Get an Instant Pot, rice cooker, air fryer, and Ninja kitchen system.
    Fun fact: Pressure cooking preserves more nutrients than steaming. 95% vs 78%, give or take.

  9. J’ai deux vieux “Presto” payés respectivement $8 et $10 canadiens dans une friperie, et un autre à $15, plus ancien, en aluminium épais, un “SEB”, qui par son style date probablement des années 1950 ou du début des années 1960 (sauf qu’il y manque malheureusement le machin qui régularise la pression, mais je suis heureux de l’avoir comme antiquité), depuis l’été dernier.
    J’apprends à peine à cuisiner avec mes deux casseroles fonctionnelles et je suis épaté. On peut simplement “steamer” des légumes (carottes ou patates par exemple) et c’est excellent. J’ai tenté un bouilli assez simple avec des cubes de porc durant la période des fêtes et c’était excellent.

  10. I go the other way. Slow cooker. Take out the ceramic pot, prep and load the indigence, cover it and put it in the fridge the night before. Get up the next morning. Remove it from the fridge. Put the ceramic pot back in the cooker. Turn it on low. Go to work. Get home 8 to 10 hours later. And I feast on the tenderest meats no matter how tough they were when I started.
    Men, I do pulled pork, barbecued chicken breasts, ribs, chili, pot roast, you name it. It’s so damned easy. I use a 4.5 quart unit and get 8 to 10 meals out of it every time I cook. Buy a set of freezer and microwave safe containers. It’s good eating, and it’s cheap as hell.

  11. Yeah, no thanks, anything Good takes time. A good loaf of bread takes 2 or 3 HOURS from start to finish. Yankee pot roast can take all day to get to the point that it’s so soft and tender that the meat practically melts with the application of a fork. You can do it in less time in a pressure cooker, or in the same time in a crock pot but where’s the love in that? If you’re gonna do it then do it right. Use a cast iron Dutch Oven, hence why I fully support the use of said apparatus for all forms of cooking, especially comfort foods that take time.

  12. Once tryed to force a pressure cooker lid open while the tip was shooting steam. Stupid kid. Almost had it off with much strength. Took off stove and tryed again an hour later. Lid flew in the air along with food inside.

  13. We sometimes act like a pressure cooker when dealing with others, especially children. If you have children, you’re probably aware of the “Dad… Dad!… DAD!!” mantra that children often employ to get your attention. And being busy, preoccupied, etc. when little Johnny or little Suzy needs something, you might not always answer straight away. Children, being very patient little souls, and will often keep ‘pestering’ you until you respond.
    Which brings us back to the pressure cooker analogy. Parents will often ignore their children until the parents can’t take it anymore and then yell at the child – also known as ‘blowing their lid off’, ‘blowing a gasket’, etc.
    The best way to handle these kinds of situations is to not let it get out of hand in the first place. Don’t ignore a situation until you can’t take it anymore and ‘explode’, saying or doing something you might later regret – just like a pressure cooker exploding all over the kitchen walls and ceiling.

Comments are closed.