Riverside Ovens
Sustainable Test Kitchen

"A confession: I already own a stovetop pressure cooker, the conventional kind that you would heat over a burner and then regulate yourself. It is currently supporting a colony of dust bunnies in the back of my highest cabinet, behind the panini press. I never got over my fear of exploding split-pea soup to use it with any regularity."
   – Melissa Clark, from NYT Food







There is a lot to consider when thinking over how to apply ideas of sustainability to good food and cooking practices.  The questions might range from philosophical to carbon foot print, from slow process to mindful eating, from local to organic. The modern consumer invested in social innovation and sustainability is, first and foremost, a thoughtful and planning consumer. But how to do this when the hours in a day are rolling by; the intentions for cooking a dynamic meal are there, but then there is the recipe to read, the grocery to visit, the peeling and prep, the dishes to retrieve (and later clean), and finally the execution of the cooking itself.  If we could all run our own restaurant at home for ourselves, that would allow for our days to become like the imagined ones of the great New York chefs who wake in the morning to beat the rush at the docks for fresh seafood, then off to the local farmer's market, maybe pull a few herbs from the rooftop herberium to boot.  In short, the home dining experience has become more complicated than ever. To quickly cook two, three, four ingredient meals gets results quick, but the ingredients more than likely will be processed; to cook long, doing your best to stay mindful, to breath through it, care for the food, and serve a nutritious meal might mean giving up your day job.  

We recently took an instapot cooking class at the local Sur La Table and might have found a tentatively working answer to some of these question. Not that the pressure cooking concept is new, but it is in trend right now and so as good a time as any to test for oneself what the popularity is all about.  For me, sustainability in cooking should have a few criteria built into it: is the food more natural than processed, is from local sources or organic sources if possible, 

and does it ultimately promote the intentional process of slow cooking?  There are many others to consider, but these are a good start.  For our class we prepared a pressure cooked cheese cake, mushroom risotto and beef spareribs, all within about an hour and forty-five minute range. This included the prep of the ingredients and the making of a side salad, not pressurized. 

The cheesecake was more than efficient, easy to make and it did come out with fully gelled and moist texture throughout.  Because the cooking time for the cake was something like 15 minutes, though, the ingredients did come out with the same silky denseness as most cheesecakes we might come to know.  It had formed something like the texture of a custard with rice beads. The graham cracker crust and the caramel salt topping gave the cake the extra flavor that it needed.

If the cheesecake showed some weaknesses, the mushroom risotto was the true standout from the instapot.  We started with some usual preparation on the stovetop, including some vinegars and wines, but quickly began to use the sautéed function of the instapot, which worked well 

within a very short period of time, eventually coming to dump the arborio rice packets, the mushroom, and the liquids into the cooker for something like 30 minutes.  As the instructor promised, if there was one comfort food meal that she uses the instapot for at least once a week, it is for a variety of risotto dishes. The pressure concept worked well to congeal all of the ingredients, self-season as it formed and reduced on its own, and came out with the kind of perfectly clumped softness to remind you of nothing better in restaurants.

Now, about the meat? It is mentioned in instapot writing that the pressure process is making paleo diet seekers very happy.  From our experience in the class, I would have to agree. We applied some browning heat, some flour, and some seasoning to the beef short ribs before we placed them into the instapot along with a red wine and onions mixture.  These were large chunks of bone-in meat.  Normally when a cook sees this, they would certainly brown and flour, but it would be a perfect application for the slow cooker, maybe leaving in the mass of pieces for a five or eight hour process depending low or high.  Our ribs came out of the cooker after 30 minutes.  As we tonged them out, the bones slid off of the meat (important to consider attitudes of red meat and sustainability at this point...where did they come from? Grass fed?, etc.) and a texture had formed by the reduction and the floured surface. As our instructor said out loud, "you'll have a hard time finding better than we are about to be served." She was right. It is possibly true that the slow cooker process might allow for the meat to absorb more of its surrounding ingredients, including, say, carrots, onions and celery, but it also seems important to think that sometimes slow cooked ribs lose their own character through the elongated process, where in the instapot, the ribs kept their distinct texture and flavor, while carrying, at least on the surface, some of its other ingredients.

If this prep had happened at home, without the extra time of instruction and collaboration, it is more than a little possible that all of this could have been done, with two pots, within an hour time.  Some of the stovetop prep could have been handled in the pot itself, as it does have a sautéed function.  By the end, if the process were streamlined, far fewer dishes would have been used, and very few of the native nutrients would have been lost: unlike boiling, any vegetable that cooks in the instapot can circulate back onto itself.  Cooking sustainably does seem to have some tension between efficiency and slowness.  It felt like there was a kind of middle ground being established in the instapot process. Energy consumption and water consumption way down. Flavor and texture way up. It is still impossible to beat the long and slow forming of a slow cooker aroma in the kitchen, but all things considered, it now has a real competitor on the counter.