Quick cooker: story of a brilliant invention and six recipes that go beyond stew

Eighties.

My sister and I were walking up the stairs, back from school amidst whistles and aromas from the pressure cookers on the block.

Already on our landing, we sniffed like bloodhounds, and the valve of the mother's pot blew us what we would have for lunch: stewed meat, lentils or chicken with tomato: everything fit in that magical container.

We do not know the smells that filled the Royal Society of London on Wednesday April 1682 when Denis Papin offered a dinner cooked with his 'digestion machine' to the most illustrious scientists in England.

We do not know if Isaac Newton, present at the event, ordered a container of beef gelatin like John Evelyn, who recounted the “delicious experiment” in his diary.

The name Papin gave to his device, 'digester', defines its usefulness;

cooking and tenderizing hard foods with minimal expenditure of time and fuel, a competition in which the pressure cooker remains unrivaled.

In the brochure of the invention, he gave recipes for mutton and lamb, veal, rabbit, pigeons, fish and legumes, and taught “how to make a very cheap gelatin” or “preserve mackerel without the need for salt.”

He offered formulas for drinks and sweets, but also for dyes and glass glue.

The artifact amazed.

“The hardest bones of beef and lamb were soft as cheese without adding water or other liquor, and cooked with less than eight ounces of charcoal.”

John Evelyn confessed to having taken a jar of cow's gelatin—“the best and clearest he had ever seen”—for his wife.

This was Denis Papin's 'digester'

The first pressure cooker was made of brass, today they are made of aluminum and stainless steel.

The so-called quick pots, only in stainless steel, a material whose hardness guarantees that a pot with good maintenance - scrupulous cleaning and replacement of valves and rubbers - is the best ally in the kitchen for life.

Cristina Galiano is the author of a great work dedicated to current home cooking.

Her e-book

From her Use your super-fast cooker to the fullest

(2012) is priceless for anyone who wants to save space, time and energy in the kitchen.

Apart from giving useful advice to avoid accidents and achieve perfect cooking, it offers precise instructions for cooking all types of ingredients, from legumes and rice, to vegetables, sauces and desserts.

Among his tips to correctly manage the superpowers of the pressure cooker, he highlights not using a watch, but a stopwatch, for cooking.

Another fan of the quick cooker is the

beloved

food leader Mikel López Iturriaga, who uses it ten out of ten times he can.

“I can't explain the reservations that a good part of the population has with this device, which is definitely one of the best inventions ever created for cooking,” he says.

“Not only does it save you time and money, there are things that turn out better than in a normal casserole.

The clearest example is stocks or broths: the capacity of the pressure cooker to extract flavors and aromas from the food and transfer them to the liquid is unbeatable, and you save yourself the hassle of spending hours waiting for them to be ready.”

If you think that with this system the broth has a lighter texture than with the traditional one, use this trick from Webos Fritos: when the pot depressurizes, uncover and cook for about 10 more minutes: you will have the best of both worlds.

The scientist Nathan Myhrvold includes the pressure cooker among the kitchen staples of the future in the book

Modernist cuisine at home

(2012), the homemade sequel to

Modernist Cuisine

(2011).

In his vindication of this instrument, he invites not to make stews, but to experiment with cooking in jars or caramelizing without supervision: losing the fear of the pressure cooker opens a world of possibilities in the kitchen.

Let's look at some (calculated for a pressure cooker, in older pressure cookers the times and liquid proportions vary).

BASMATI RICE

It doesn't stick even a little bitEsperanza Pelaez

Time:

7 minutes

Ingredients

• 200 g of rice

• 200 g of water

• 1 tablespoon EVOO or 30 g butter

• Salt

Instructions

ROUND RICE

Time:

10 minutes

Ingredients

• 200 g of rice

• 300 g of water (the proportion is 1 to 1.5 in grams. With the same time and adjusting the proportion of water, you can cook 400 g of rice)

• 1 tablespoon EVOO

• 2 cloves of garlic with skin, broken

• Laurel (optional)

• Salt

Instructions

Quinoa, buckwheat, millet:

Cook like round rice.

Pearl barley, brown rice:

Cook like round rice, but with a rice to water ratio of 1 to 1.75 (for 200 g grain, 350 g water), and time for five minutes.

SEAFOOD RICE, LOOSE AND PERFECT

Time:

11 minutes

Ingredients

4-5 people

For the sofrito

• 6 cloves of garlic

• 1 ripe tomato

• 4 tablespoons EVOO

• 1 tablespoon of paprika or ñora pulp

• 0.5 g saffron threads

for seafood

• 600 g of squid, cleaned and chopped

• 300 g of peeled shrimp (the heads can be used for the fumet)

• 500 g of steamed open mussels (the water can be used for the fumet)

for the rice

• 400 g bomb rice

• 600 g fish stock

• 3 tablespoons EVOO

• Salt

Instructions

CHEESE FLAN IN A JAR

More practical, impossibleEsperanza Pelaez

Time:

10 minutes

Ingredients

For 8 flans in 200 ml glass jars with screw lids

For the flan

• 250 g cream cheese

• 100 g of fresh artisan goat cheese

• 4 eggs

• 400 ml evaporated milk

• 80g sugar

for the caramel

• 130g sugar

• 2 tablespoons of water

Instructions

COOKED OCTOPUS

Time:

7 minutes

Ingredients

• A fresh octopus of 1.5 to 2 kilos

Instructions

CARAMELIZED ONION IN JAR

Time:

45 minutes

Ingredients

For 3 jars of 200 g capacity

• 500 g onion, peeled and cut into fine julienne strips

• 2 tablespoons EVOO

• 1.5 g baking soda

• Water

Instructions

From the laboratory to home

To achieve a hermetic seal on Papin's digester, it had to be screwed.

A small amount of water and a basket with food were placed inside.

When put on fire, the steam given off by the hot water, finding no outlet, raised the internal pressure and increased the temperature, allowing the water to be heated above 100ºC without boiling.

Current pressure cookers reach 121 degrees.

The traditional pressure cooker ranges between 110 and 114ºC.

To avoid explosions - one of the biggest fears of those who used it - when a certain pressure was reached, a valve was activated that released steam.

The high heating power reduced cooking time by between 30% and 70%.

We had to wait centuries for the digester to reach homes.

The Zaragoza inventor José Álix patented the world's first prototype of the “pressure cooker” in 1919, and sold the manufacturing rights to the boilermaker Camilo Bellvis Calatayud, who marketed the first portable pressure cooker.

Álix contributed by publishing a book with 360 recipes to take advantage of it.

The pressure cooker had an uneven fate in the world: while the United States ignored it until the emergence in 2017 of the 'Instant Pot', an electric and programmable version, in Spain or India, with a great tradition of legumes and stews, its use It became widespread at the end of 1950. With 1,428 million inhabitants, India is the country where the most pressure cookers are sold, and owning one is a symbol of progress.

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