Chicken at 204kPa

In my last post, I made mention of the pressure cooker as a brilliant tool for getting in the habit of cooking for yourself.

Meat comes out tender and juicy, root veggies are done to perfection, and nothing we've yet cooked takes longer than about an hour and twenty minutes from start to finish (not including prep time). That means, you seal it up, get it up to pressure, cook, and let it cool to the point you can open it. Some things are stupidly fast... winter squash only takes about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes for hard squash to cook! And, most of that time is spent coming up to pressure... it only cooks at full pressure for four minutes. Then, you can stick it under the faucet and douse it in cold water to quickly de-pressurize it (NOTE: you can't use the quick-cool method with everything).

So, Darren had some experience with this cooking tool when we met, I had had none. Recently, he tried putting a whole chicken in there, something he had no experience with. Had just never occurred to us. Maybe because it seems like it might be unworkable, a whole bird, with all the bones and whatnot.

Turns out, it's bloody awesome! The bird comes out tender, juicy (even the often too-dry breast meat), and the bones are no problem; the meat falls right off them.

So, it turns out that a basic Googling of  "whole chicken pressure cooker" yields loads of tasty recipes. Guess this is old news to most folks but us. However, because we hadn't ever thought of it, I'm going to go ahead and guess that some of you haven't ever tried either. It's dead easy to do, and you can choose from the wide array of available recipes on the net, or try ours:

Pour about an inch of chicken or beef stock into the pressure cooker. Place one whole chicken into the pressure cooker with some thyme (we use fresh cut from the garden, just throw the whole sprigs in), a few cloves of garlic, salt and pepper. Seal it up, let it come to pressure (you'll know this has happened when the weighted rocker on the top of the lid starts hissing in a steady rhythm), and let it cook for about 20 minutes (this may need to be adjusted slightly if your bird is exceptionally large or small, there's a chart here). When the timer goes off, take it off the heat, and let it sit until the little lock pin valve in the handle drops.

Presto! (Hah! see what I did there?) A fabulous chicken dinner!