Mia Bachmaier - Instant Pot: Family Favourites

CONTENTS

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. Published by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd FIRST EDITION EPub Edition: December 2017 EPub ISBN: 9781443454933 HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4W 1A8 www.harpercollins.ca Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request. ISBN 978-1-44345-492-6 QG 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This is a book about home cooking. Its about real food. And its about easy.

But its not speed cooking. In fact, at first glance a dozen ingredients in a recipe may not look easy, but heres the secret: its the electric pressure cooker (EPC). If you put the ingredients into the pot the way weve outlined in each recipe, youll get a finished product that will advance your culinary capabilities. Weve made it easy for you to serve your family chef-at-home-quality meals without needing 20-plus years of experience in a professional kitchen. We did that part for you. Weve taken many classics, requiring many different skill sets and techniques, and squeezed them all into the electric pressure cooker.

We lovingly refer to our home pressure cooker as the meal machine. But lets back things up a bit. We met working in the kitchen in our youth, back when we were jung und spritzig. These days, we are two well-trained chefs with a growing, hungry family and a freelance lifestyle. We cook from scratch at home with simple ingredients and try to get the best vegetables and proteins we can afford. Cooking for and feeding the rascals, as well as ourselves, is a huge part of our lives.

We have a small garden, and each year we try to grow a few tomatoes and cucumbers, lots of herbs, and a few rows of lettuce. Admittedly, were not great farmers. Thats fine we have fun, the kids are into it, and were happy to support the local markets. We squeeze five of us around the family table every day, and theres always room for guests. One day while pondering the meal plan, we were throwing around ideas on how we could make things a little easier, a little faster within our tight schedule. A friend suggested an EPC.

Although were not the type for kitchen gimmicks, the next thing you know, theres an electric pressure cooker in our house. Admittedly, it sat in the box for over a week. Wed smile at it, wondering what to do with it. We knew only of the horror stories from our elders, but out of the box it finally came. Manual read, water test done. Lets do this.

Not long after we started cooking with the electric pressure cooker, we noticed that the flavours were different, in a good way: there was far more flavour and better flavour than we expected. This pressure cooker was no gimmick not just another countertop appliance. This was the real deal. We had perfectly cooked chickpeas, creamy on the inside with a tender pop when you bite in. They had such a wonderful clean flavour. Next was the day of the carrots.

You have to try these carrots, Mia! They taste like... carrots! Regular grocery store carrots these were, but bursting with enough robust flavour to make an impression. We had not had a more carroty experience in all our years of cooking and eating. We were hooked. We wanted to cook everything in our pressure cooker. After a few more weeks of meals, we were learning the ins and the outs of the machine.

We discovered that it was superb at soups, stews, and braises, which would normally take two or even three times as long to prepare on the stovetop. And the flavours were notably intense. For this book, we approached the electric pressure cooker as if it were the only heat source we had in our kitchen. If this machine was designed to do all it promised, we wouldnt need the others. Weve designed these recipes exclusively for the EPC. We always pressure cook and saut on high, and set the timer using the manual controls.

It makes these recipes easy to follow and really simplifies the machine operation. While sometimes they have different names, these settings are pretty standard across the popular brands of EPCs. We know that, in the real world, many people have more than just the EPC and choose to bake, broil, or grill items before or after pressure cooking to get the finish and texture they like. Go ahead have fun and do it your way. That being said, you wont find recipes in this book that require frying pans, barbecues, ovens, or microwaves. You and your machine, just the two of you, can go a long way together.

When we started cooking with an electric pressure cooker, and because of the hype, we were excited for all the time we were going to save but unaware of the other benefits that soon came to light. It was after we made in the same afternoon that we realized how the machine could change the way we cooked meals at home. Pre-EPC, a couple of pots simmering on the stove for the better part of a day would have our windows steamed up and our air conditioner battling to keep up. We knew then that, even if our meals took the same amount of time to prepare in the electric pressure cooker as they do on the stove (which they certainly dont), we would be tempted to use the pressure cooker just for the economy we were getting elsewhere. In that spirit, we worked our machine hard for this book. We pushed it to its limits just to see where they were.

We found them and, yes, we messed up a few meals in the process. First it was the instead. It was like learning to cook anew. These hurdles led to stronger recipes as we pushed forward, further modifying techniques and understanding that being incredibly specific with the amount of liquid in each recipe led to better outcomes. Bringing thicker, tomato-based dishes to a simmer before closing the lid, allowing for much less time between the last stir and the start of the pressure cycle, was another lesson we learned the hard way. Same goes for some of the recipes high in sugar, with that ingredient now often added at the end as a safeguard against burning.

We learned to replace large amounts of low-fat dairy with small amounts of the high-fat variety. Many times, theres already enough liquid when you remove the lid, so all you need is the creaminess. And on and on. We were never afraid to go back to the drawing board. Lets face it: recent generations were brought up scared of pressure cookers, and thats the main reason they fell out of fashion after the 1960s although its not the only reason. Dig a little into the history of food and you can see other influences at play during that era.