Pressure cooker 0 Remoska 1

This pressure cooker thing has been bugging me so I thought I'd remake the recipe in a Remoska, a Czech tabletop cooker that also claims to be energy-saving.

I tweaked it slightly, leaving out the mustard and adding a bit of chorizo but the whole thing was much, much tastier than Saturday night's effort. OK it took longer - about 40 minutes - but I didn't have to do anything while it was cooking.

I also rescued the leftovers from the abortive pressure cooked chicken by taking the chicken off the bone, putting it back with the onions and stock, heating it up and stirring in a good dollop of wild garlic pesto I bought at the Love Food Spring Festival at the weekend. This transformed it into a really quite passable chicken and wild garlic soup. I can imagine poaching (note, poaching not pressure cooking!) a whole chicken and serving it with new potatoes and spring veg, the chicken broth and a dollop of wild garlic pesto - like a cross between an aioli and a salsa verde.

Anyway this is my adaptation of Richard's original recipe. For the Remoska or oven, not for the pressure cooker, if you please . . .

Spanish-style chicken
Serves 2
1 tbsp olive oil
75g chorizo, cut into cubes
4 chicken thighs
3 small onions, peeled and quartered
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
75ml dry sherry or white wine)
125ml chicken or vegetable stock
8/9 green olives
Handful of chopped fresh parsley
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the olive oil and fry the chorizo until the fat starts to run. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside. Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper, brown on both sides and place in the remoska or a casserole. Quickly fry the onions in the chorizo-y oil then stir in the garlic. Tip in the sherry and bring up to the boil then add the stock and pour over the chicken. Stir in reserved chorizo and the olives. Cook for about 40 minutes in the Remoska or cover with a lid and place in a low oven until the chicken is nicely browned. Stir in the chopped parsley and serve with rice.

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Pressure cookers are just not for me

Ever since I last blogged about pressure cookers (three years ago I discovered, to my amazement) I’ve had this sense of unfinished business. They are such a frugal way of cooking it seemed wrong not to give them another try. I was prompted to have go by the publication of a really inspiring book by my colleague Richard Ehrlich called 80 Recipes for Your Pressure Cooker.

Now you can see how many of the recipes I fancied from the number pink post-it notes marking the pages. I really thought this was going to be it. The big breakthrough. I unearthed the pressure cooker from the back of a cupboard, dusted it down, managed to find the instruction book (no small feat) gave it the recommended checkover and was ready to go.

I chose a delicious-looking recipe for chicken with sherry, mustard and olives as I had most of the ingredients and followed the instructions to the letter. Everything seemed to go fine - the pressure indicator went up, steam emitted, the cooker burbled comfortingly - the 10 minutes recommended cooking time was up and .... the chicken wasn’t cooked.

I put the lid on again brought it back up to pressure, cooked it for another 5 minutes which did the trick but worryingly it didn’t smell particularly appetising despite the presence of onions, garlic (my addition) and fino sherry


The end result while looking just about presentable was almost inedible. The skin, despite the fact I’d browned it, was wet, limp and colourless. The onions were devoid of flavour. No taste of mustard, olives or even sherry despite the fact I’d used the full 100ml Richard recommended. My husband laboured manfully through it but basically it was crap.

There are a number of reasons why that might have been the case:

* I could have failed to follow the instructions. Always possible but I was careful to read them through again carefully

* My AGA plates might not have been sufficiently hot to get the wretched thing up and running. Maybe but the thermostat didn’t show it was running slow. And I couldn’t find anything that suggested you shouldn’t use a pressure cooker on an AGA

* Maybe the gasket needed replacing. Again possible but I’d only used it a couple of times (and the result had been equally unsatisfactory then). And it didn’t look or feel as if the rubber had perished

* It’s not a particularly good model. Could be. Tower is a reliable make, long associated with pressure cookers, however it doesn’t get very good reviews here

* Richard’s recipe didn’t work. No way. It sounded good - it should have been good. I’m sure if he’d made it it would have been good . . .

* Pressure cookers and I are just incompatible. The most likely explanation. I’ve never liked microwaves either . . .

Anyway if you ARE a pressure cooker fan let me recommend the book. It’s got lots of lovely frugal - and not so frugal recipes - in it I can’t wait to try including a couple of cracking meat loaves, a great-sounding shin of beef with an Asian dipping sauce you seem to be able to rustle up in a quarter of an hour and an awesome New England blueberry pudding. Only I’m going to have to find another way to cook them.

So, you pressure cooker lovers out there - what do you think I did wrong? And tell me why you like yours?

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Why I don't like pressure cookers

I forgot to tell you - I acquired a pressure cooker. A reasonable deal on Amazon - 50% off - but . . .

It's just as bad as they always used to be, except marginally less scary.

Now you may well have a pressure cooker and love it to bits but here's why I don't like them.

I've made two things with it, a chicken stock and some cannelini beans and both would have been better if I'd made them the conventional way.

The handbook advised me to cook my chicken carcasses for 40 (yes, forty) minutes which seemed an incredibly long time but as I hadn't used it before I took their word for it. Of course it came out cloudy and slightly bitter-tasting. Better when it was skimmed but I ended up - most unfrugally - throwing it away.

The beans, I was told, didn't have to be pre-soaked, simply submerged in boiling water for an hour which seemed like a good time-saving notion but it was far from clear how long they needed to be cooked.

The handbook didn't mention them. It recommended 5 minutes for haricot beans, 10 minutes for small butter beans and 15 for kidney beans to which cannelini beans are related. I decided to give them 12 and found they'd started to fall apart when I opened the cooker.

I also thought they were less digestible than usual though that may be my imagination or general grumpiness about the whole enterprise.

I'll give it another go but if all else fails at least I've got a large saucepan for cooking pasta.

Unless you're pulse-mad and cook them a couple times a week from scratch I wouldn't bother.

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