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30 July 08
re: pressure-cooker risotto |
| mb: |
| So Mom, I know you always like to have a project when you stay at the cabin, and you said this year you were going to work on overcoming your fear of pressure cookers. How did it go? |
| m-c: |
| In self-defense, I have to say that I grew up in a family where at least once a month somebody would point solemnly up to the scars on my grandmother's kitchen ceiling where a pressure cooker had turned itself into a sort of mashed‑potato Molotov cocktail. |
| But for years I've been reading about how modern pressure cookers are absolutely safe, and I even went so far as to buy one a couple of years ago, but I still resisted using it. |
| mb: |
| Is there something about the cabin that makes pressure cookers particularly attractive? |
| m-c: |
| Yup, the cabin is at 7,200 feet above sea level, which means that water boils at 196° instead of 212°. And that in turn means that soups and stews and pasta, all of which depend on the boiling temperature of water, come out very weird. You have to cook a soup forever, topping off the water and topping off the water, to get anything cooked, and pasta simply turns to pallid mush over the course of an eternity of cooking. |
| Because the pressure cooker provides its own internal sea level, so to speak, it's not much affected by the external altitude. Sass suggests adding 10% more cooking time per 2,000 feet above sea level, but I didn't find that necessary. |
| I got myself four books: |
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Rick Rodgers and Arlene Ward Pressure Cooking for Everyone Chronicle, 2000 |
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Lorna Sass Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure Morrow, 1994 |
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Lorna Sass Pressure Perfect Morrow, 2004 |
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Victoria Wise The Pressure Cooker Gourmet Harvard Common Press, 2003 |
| Sass is usually credited with having begun the pressure cooker revival in the United States, and she's an interesting author. She writes vegan, vegetarian, and omnivore books, all three. I don't know whether she is herself vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, or omnivorous. Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure is, obviously, vegetarian, and Pressure Perfect is for omnivores. |
| Victoria Wise is a favorite of mine. Her gift is for combining the imaginative with the down-to-earth. The depth and breadth of her culinary knowledge mean she can always come up with something new but interesting. I trust her; I'm going to give her Mexican chilled potato soup with cantaloupe and almonds a try, whereas in most other cookbooks I would just look at the title and laugh. (Well, I do laugh at hers too, but I'm going to try it anyway.) |
| Talking about cooking steamed puddings in a pressure cooker, she writes, "There's no need to add water to rise halfway up the side of the dish, as in a bain marie, nor is it necessary to keep the dish completely out of the water, as in Chinese-style steaming." That's the kitchen equivalent of writing documentation for both the Mac and the PC in a the same sentence with equal grace. |
| Rick Rogers is a sort of cookbook Jack-of-all-trades; I don't have as clear a conception of his cookbook personality as I do of the other two, but I've used his On Rice (Chronicle, 1997) for several years, and he's collaborated on chefs' cookbooks that are not mere vanity projects. Arlene Ward owns a cookware store and introduced Rogers to pressure cooking when he came to teach a class there. |
| The photographs in the Rogers and Ward book, as in most Chronicle books, are appealing. The older Lorna Sass book is handsomely laid out but predates the Great Photography Revolution; nice swoopy line drawings but no photographs. The design of Pressure Perfect, the newer Sass book, is plain but serviceable; no photographs, no flair, but a sober, classic cookbook look -- it could have been published in 1930 and not look much different. I found myself using it more as a reference than for its recipes; the neatly laid out tables and lists are an efficient source of information (although unaccountably the book doesn't mention broccoli). |
| The Pressure Cooker Gourmet is visually revolting, with smudged, shambolic layouts, nasty type choices, and no respect for content -- the kind of book that makes an author want to sue the publisher for ill treatment. Harvard Common Press should be ashamed of themselves. |
| Such ugliness and chaos are particularly cruel in the case of Victoria, whose recipes abound with insights about the visual aspects of food and cooking. Talking about the dear old dish called plate soup, she says, "Plating the soup individually rather than serving it family style adds immeasurably to the visual appeal of the dish and, insofar as the eyes inform the palate, also to the taste of the dish." Or describing cooking with brussels sprouts on the stem from her garden, she says, "When plucking the sprouts for the kitchen, I always leave two or three top ones on the stem so they can go to flower and provide visual interest in a tall vase as cooked ones provide edible interest on the plate," which makes me long to be invited to supper at her house. In the introduction, she gives us a section about using garnishes for visual appeal as well as taste and texture -- a section, I must say, that those of us who have undertaken to photograph our dishes will find invaluable. |
| Perhaps cookbook readers could join together in some kind of class-action suit against publishers who betray our favorite authors with hideous layout and shoddy production values. I've been using Wise's book for no more than three weeks and the binding (a so-called "perfect" binding -- never was a name less deserved) has already broken. But more of that another time. |
| The statement that really caught my eye was on page 150 of Lorna Sass's Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure: |
| More than any other dish, it's the creation of a 5-minute risotto that catapults the pressure cooker into the 1990s kitchen. |
| The 5-minute risotto? Did you say the 5-minute risotto? |
| So I decided to focus on just that one dish, risotto, which I had never made, and to learn how to cook it in a pressure cooker. |
| mb: |
| You never made risotto? |
| m-c: |
| Nope. I'd eaten it in restaurants -- I love Il Fornaio's risotti -- and a couple of years ago I had a fish risotto at a friend's so suave and flavorful that it lingers in my memory still. But sitting there ladling out one sip at a time for the thirsty rice to absorb? Not my style. I like things that take a long time to cook, but in the background, leaving me free to go play elsewhere. |
| I had the vague idea that restaurants knew some special way of cooking risotto without requiring some poor scullery rat to stand there ladling and stirring and ladling and stirring, but I didn't know what it was. |
| mb: |
| What did you make first? |
| m-c: |
| I had a couple of other books with me, Nigella's Forever Summer, which I was just finishing out, Andy Garcia's In a Cuban Kitchen (Running Press, 2004), and Jamie Oliver's Cook with Jamie (Hyperion, 2007). |
| Jamie's book has food photography by David Loftus, who makes me want to run out and cook every single recipe immediately, and we had worthy tomatoes from the little hippie-dippy market we shop at in South Lake Tahoe, so I decided to start with Jamie's recipe for tomato, basil, and ricotta risotto on pages 126-127. No decent ricotta to be found, but goat cheese makes a good substitute. |
| Jamie doesn't use a pressure cooker for his risotto. (In fact, he explains restaurant risotto, cooked about three-quarters through, then spread out and cooled, ready to be returned to the risotto pot and delivered to your table only ten minutes after you have ordered it. Same amount of ladling and stirring, just divided into two.) I took a flier on combining times and amounts from the various pressure-cooker books, scaling them, applying them to Jamie's recipe, and keeping an open mind about what came out. |
| Well. |
| If I had any doubts about the project, they were immediately dispelled, all worries flown. The risotto was easily as good as anything I had ever had at a restaurant, good enough not to dishonor the memory of that home-made fish risotto that still haunts me. |
| As Darwin loved to say last time I saw him, "Oh wow." |
| mb: |
| Still does. So tell us more. Was it just an initial stroke of good luck, or were you on a roll? |
| m-c: |
| On a roll. Leftover stew risotto (Jamie, pp. 134-135), using a lovely tomato meat sauce our niece Tabatha left for us. Shrimp and fennel seed risotto (Wise, pp. 223-224). Spinach and goat cheese risotto (Jamie, pp. 128-129). Chicken liver risotto with sage (Wise, p. 225). Spicy breadcrumb risotto (Jamie, pp. 122-123). Broccoli risotto with white beans (Sass, GVCUP, pp. 152-153). A risotto festival. |
| And I loved the way the pressure cooker did double duty for the risotti. As you know, I've given up using store-bought broths almost entirely, after previously relying on Andy Warhol's favorite brand when I hadn't the time or the energy to make my own. Making broth at the cabin used to be a huge hassle; it cooked dry before extracting the flavor from meats and bones and vegetables. But now my magic pressure cooker can make a distinguished broth in 15 minutes, give or take. I love the rhythm of making the broth, decanting the broth, wiping out the pressure cooker, frying the rice, adding the broth, cooking the risotto. Like a one-man band. |
| mb: |
| Not a dud in the bunch? |
| m-c: |
| I had a little trouble with cooking the rice unevenly until I started to follow Victoria's lead in letting the pressure sink down of its own accord. Quick depressurization, which you accomplish by carrying the steam-filled cooker to the sink and running cold water over it -- whoosh! -- is lots of fun, but I get better results by letting the cooker sit around for five to fifteen minutes, slowly decompressing, and then releasing any remaining steam. |
| mb: |
| And you got over your pressure cooker phobia? |
| m-c: |
| Completely. I made several of other dishes in the pressure cooker as well. A corn and rice dish that I had pictured in my mind as a risotto, but with equal parts rice and corn it becomes something else. A cheesy dish of rice and field greens. And a steamed blueberry pudding that was leaden and gluey, but that's not the pressure cooker's fault. |
| mb: |
| Papa had to take pills for all these risottos and cheesy things? |
| m-c: |
| He did, and he was such a good sport about it -- thank you, Mark, thank you, Lactaid Ultra. |
| mb: |
| So will you give us a recipe? |
| m-c: |
| I promise. Which one sounds best to you? |
| mb: |
| I guess the Jamie tomato, the very first one you tried. |
| m-c: |
| You have my word on it. |
Questions? Comments? Corrections?
Suggestions? Contributions?
Please let us know!
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