Silver Case

I was browsing the cookbook section of Borders today. I saw they had a version two copy of my Alton Brown “I’m Just Here For the Food” book. I picked through it and saw his recipe for pressure-cooker chilli again.

There’s not much to it. He just cooks really nasty, tough, sinewy pieces of meat in a pressure cooker, so that it cooks really quick. (twenty-five minutes instead of six hours or whatever). Beyond that, there isn’t much recipe, and I dispute his lack of beans or tomato (except for what is in the can of salsa).

Anyway, so I went next door to Japanese grocery store Seiyu and bought the cheapest pieces of beef and pork they had (which weren’t all that sinewy or bad, frankly) and took it home.

I made a few variations:

• I did add a can of kidney beans
• I did add a can of stewed tomatos (in addition to a jar of medium salsa)
• I made my own proto-adobo sauce — about six cloves of slivered garlic and an onion, softened to a soffrito, and deglazed with balsamic vinegar, sherry vinegar, and cider vinegar.
• I made my own chilli powder from red chili flaked fried lightly in oil along with garlic and onion powder, a lot of cumin, paprika, cocoa, cinammon, and… that’s all I guess.
• I used a small can of Kirin rather than a mexican medium ale.

The thing Alton Brown goes on about the pressure cooker is that it cooks 2/3rds faster, just because it gets so hot. Ok great, but it doesn’t magically eliminate the principle of “carbon based food at really high temp burns.” Which is exactly what happened to me. I smelt a tinge of ‘burnt’ in the steam, so I quickly took it off the heat and vented it. Sure enough there was a quarter-inch of carbonized char on the bottom of the pot. Fortunately nothing stirred the pot, so it never mixed up with the food, so actualyl the rest of the chilli tasted great. But I am not sure what to do about this, I guess it means I need to cook with more water.

The beef tasted really soft and nice. It benefitted from the cooking. I think the pork was a little lean to begin with, so it tended to be drier and less pleasant, but was still totally edible. The thing that go me was the pressure cooker…

Anyway, verdict was cheap and good. Especially with some cheddar cheese and sour cream. It takes longer to cook than he implies because the pressure cooker takes a long time to cool down on its own, but still it can all be done in less than an hour, which is not bad for a non-hamburger-based chilli.

Here is some wisdom on scorching food in pressure cookers.  I cooked my stuff too hot. As well, it was a tomato based product (hard to do, they say) and I mixed in corn chips from the beginning, according to Brown’s recipe, which adds corn starch/flour, also advised-against by this guide.  Next time I’ll try less-brutal heat.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Alton Brown Good Eats.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.