Pressure Cooked Carnitas

My wife has quite the international background, and while she was born in China, she actually spent the majority of her childhood in Panama before moving to the US as a young teenager. While growing up in Panama, she and her family had a maid that would cook meals for them. One of my wife's favorite dishes was carnitas, and she said the maid would cook it in a pressure cooker.

Pressure cooking is gaining more popularity nowadays and it's featured as a cooking technique in the Modernist Cuisine cookbook, but pressure cooking actually is really old school. There's evidence that pressure cooking was invented and used as early as the 1600s.

I had never actually seen a pressure cooker until watching an episode of Iron Chef on the Food Network. On Iron Chef, contestants have an hour to cook the secret ingredient, which in this case was beef chuck, a tough cut of beef that typically requires long amounts of cooking to become edible. The Iron Chef used a number of pressure cookers to quickly breakdown and tenderize the secret ingredient. That sparked my interest in pressure cookers - if an Iron Chef used them, why shouldn't I?

If you aren't familiar with pressure cookers, here's the skinny on how they work. In an ordinary non-pressurised cooking pot, the boiling point of water is 212 °F. However, in a sealed pressure cooker, the boiling point of water can increase to a much higher temperature because of the pressure that builds up in the pot due to the steam trapped inside. This higher temperature water and vapor transfers heat very rapidly to the food, dramatically shortening the cooking process.

For a party we recently attended, we made some carnitas using the recipe my wife's family maid followed years ago. It's actually really easy and doesn't take much time at all using a pressure cooker.
We went to our local grocery store and purchased some pork shoulder - it's a pretty inexpensive cut of meat that shouldn't cost more than a couple dollars per pound.

We cut this into a few large chunks and seasoned them liberally with a combination of salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, and oregano. We then browned the meat in the bottom of the pressure cooker pot.

After browning the meat, we threw in some roughly chopped celery, green bell pepper, onions and garlic and let these aromatics sweat down a bit. After a few minutes, we then added water - yep, plain water - enough to just cover the meat and vegetables.

We brought this up to a boil, sealed the lid on the pressure cooker, and let it rip for about an hour. Here's the final result:

The carnitas are great and about as good as you would find at any local Mexican restaurant. We typically eat this as tacos with some store-bought corn tortillas and a quick homemade pico-de-gallo.

Pressure Cooked Bolognese with Tagliatelle

Some of the fondest memories of my childhood were enjoying home cooked meals that my mother put together, and one of my favorite dishes of all time is her bolognese sauce with pasta. Bolognese is a delicious, hearty meat sauce eaten in the Bologna region of Italy and is typically put together using a combination of ground meats, such as beef, pork or veal. My spin on the bolognese that takes it to a new level is adding some mascarpone cheese.

Bolognese usually takes a while to make. My mom used to slowly simmer it on the stove or in a low oven for hours and hours on say, a Sunday. She would start it after lunch and then let it cook all afternoon so that it would eventually be ready for dinner. The warm, inviting aromas would fill the whole house and if I was doing homework in my room, it would honestly be hard to concentrate!

I was in the mood for bolognese during the week, and while I love my mom's slow cooked meat sauce, I didn't have all that time. Instead, I used my pressure cooker to make the sauce and help cut down some of the cooking time. Here's what I did:

When I got home from work around 5, I banged out all my mis-en-place. Instead of chopping by hand all of the vegetables (onions, carrots, and celery), I used my food processor instead. After the vegetables were chopped up, I threw them into the pressure cooker pot with some olive oil, salt, and pepper (with the lid off) and started to sweat them down. After cooking for 5-10 minutes, I added in some chopped garlic along with some dried herbs, such as oregano, basil and thyme.

While the vegetables were cooking, in a seperate pan, I browned up some ground pork, beef, and sweet italian sausage (tip: buy the sausage meat without the casings from your butcher - also typically a bit cheaper).

After the ground meat was browned all over, I threw this into the pressure cooker pot that contained all the sweated vegetables. With all the ingredients combined, I finally added in a few cups of red wine, canned crushed tomatoes, and a cup or two of leftover chicken stock I had hanging out in the fridge. I brought this up to a boil, put the lid on the pressure cooker, and then lowered the flame to medium-low.

I let the sauce cook in the pressure cooker for around an hour. Pressure cooking is great because it cuts down the cooking time and gives you that all-day cooking taste without the time and hassle. It takes a little time to let the pressure inside the pot to dissipate and you won't be able to open the lid until it does, but a good way to quicken this process is to manually release some pressure using the steam valve at the top of the pot (I usually use a pair of tongs for this). Another way is to take the pressure cooker and run it under cold water in your sink. Whatever you do, be careful and use caution because a pressure cooker can be dangerous if not used correctly. To be safe, always consult the instruction guide that came from the manufacturer with the pressure cooker.

To finish the sauce, I added a dollop of mascarpone cheese along with some jullienned fresh basil just at the end before serving. I served the bolognese with some Barilla tagliatelle pasta. Absolutely delicious!