Pots, pans and cookware are tools. Yes, it’s great to use nice gear but the romanization of cooking, patience and love is all good…until you cook for someone sick, in need or dying. Then the nice tools and patience goes out the window. Nursing a pot of stock is a fantasy for some. Certainly use care but time is a commodity for some. Also, it’s not the tool or pan…it’s the cook. A good cook uses what they have and is open to “new” tech that 100 years old, if it can make life and the process of providing just a little easier.
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I agree wholeheartedly. That’s, at least for me, why I specified “strictly from a final product perspective.” I spent forty years working at a very demanding job and cooking for a family with a person with a disability who had a lot of challenging requirements. Using a pressure cooker would have been a challenge! He learned to like and came to expect pan sauces with proteins, enough to drizzle over rice, barley, potatoes, etc. Now he is living on his own, and I am old and tired enough that big production cooking is much less appealing. I have joined the “from start to plating has to be twenty minutes or less or we change the menu” club! Having good broth on hand really helps.
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My mother lived with us the last six years of her life as a dementia patient. I already didn’t need a whole lot of sleep but I ended up figuring out how to get by on 3.5 to 4.0 hours and maybe a short nap during the day. Getting up at 2:00 a.m. to cook maintained my sanity.
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For me using a pressure cooker or multi cooker for making stock sort of defeats the whole purpose of making the stock as an amateur home cook.
When I finally do make a home made stock, and I don’t do that very often, I want to enjoy the whole process and not risk cutting corners to save time and lose quality in the final product.
There’s nothing wrong with pressure cookers and Multi cookers - in fact I own a very nice Multi cooker that was gifted to me. I can most certainly make a nice stew, soup, rice and a good stock in it - but whenever I use it, I feel like some of the last 5% of taste in the dish is lost.
So right now my Multi Cooker is only being used a my standard rice cooker and nothing else.
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The other day I was making chicken stock for tortilla soup. I concluded that the most important tool for making stock was the instant read thermometer. I hovered over it as it was getting started and ensured that the moment it hit 190F it was moved off the hot burner and onto a small burner where it sat at its smile for about 4 1/2 hours. It was crystal clear and delicious, despite its humble origins of a rotisserie chicken carcass and collected vegetable trimmings.
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My go-to is to start with a vegetable stock, then use it to make a brown chicken stock, then it to make another brown chicken stock – basically a triple stock. This gets used like crazy at home. Nothing like a white Bordeaux, Emily Dickinson, and a triple stock bubbling away at 2:00 a.m. This is when my brain heals.
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Maybe we need to have more chicken. I make a brown vegetable and chicken stock in one fell swoop. I will take the extra steps, however, with beef stock since it is both rare and precious around here.
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Jacques Pepin used pressure cookers…and other technologies. He had no issue or illusions about. It’s not perfect for everything but it’s a useful tool for certain things…like if you have to break down beef bones, it does cut down a lot of time. I found his time working (and writing about it) for Howard Johnson very interesting and enlightening.
BTW, I did my stint of care giving…starting off while working a FT regular job and a heavy 3/4 quarts side gig. That’s when I started smoking cannabis again. Turned into a ten year deal. If I can save a little time but still have good results and quality, I’m all for it. Time is a commodity.
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Were I designing a menu and a set of procedures for a nationwide chain of low to mid-range hotels to follow, in the 1960s and 1970s, pressure cookers probably would have been a feature. Maybe he still uses them at home. I don’t know. Pretty much don’t care. If they strike the right chord with you, for whatever reason(s), that’s great. By all means keep using one.
All that said, I’m not apologizing for using a plain stock pot and arranging my affairs so that I can.
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I try to never be without a strong chicken stock. So useful.
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Why would you apologize for using a plain stock pot? I use a plain stock pot as well. Sometimes I use other types of pots and technology as well.
Yay.
When I make stock or even a large soup, I use my Lagostina Accademia Lagofusion stock 22" stock pot. It’s not big for large batches but fine for my needs. It’s both a disc and with thinner clad sidewalls. I’ve had no issues with this pot or any of their other cookware I have, It might be pricey, I got deals on them from the various European Amazon sites then.
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