The Complete Book of Pressure Cooking. L.D. Michaels
tasted at the end of cooking time. Adjust seasoning. Add finely chopped fresh herbs like parsley, sage and chervil as the liquid cools. Occasionally, one vegetable can become overpowering, particularly when the cooking time has been long. You’ll soon develop a sense of what to avoid.
4 This stock will keep about 24 hours. On reuse, adjust seasoning. Adding soy sauce or miso (fermented soya paste, from health-food and Asian shops and suppliers) will give a meatier taste. Adding sesame oil will give a nutty taste. These additions are made right at the end of the cooking process – thus, if you are using the vegetable stock as the basis of a vegetable soup, you would cook your vegetable scraps in the vegetable stock for the appropriate period, depressurize, open up the lid and add the seasonings as the soup cools down and just before serving. (N.B. If you try miso, you will need less salt, as the paste is already very salty.) You can add grated cheese at the end of the cooking period as well.
10 minutes
Ingredients as for Vegetable Stock plus:
1 tablespoon oil
1 large onion, unpeeled and diced
1 tablespoon sugar
tomato purée, to taste (optional)
1 Heat oil in base of cooker and turn into it the diced onion (which should include the skin) and the sugar. Fry until the onion and sugar caramelize and turn brown. (If you wish, you could add scraps of fresh ginger root at the same time to give an Asian flavour.)
2 Then proceed as before. The onion colours the fluid as well as flavouring it. Tomato purée will make the result look redder and taste sweeter.
15 minutes
white fish scraps, including head, tail, bones, skin (if not too scaly) – be wary of very strong-tasting or oily fish like mackerel, herring or mullet
1 onion, diced
1 carrot, diced
1 leek, diced
squeeze of lemon juice
1 bay leaf
bouquet garni
salt and pepper
1 Wash fish scraps and bring to boil in base of cooker. Remove scum, add vegetables and bring to boil, making sure that fluid does not more than half fill cooker. Add lemon juice, bay leaf, bouquet garni and seasoning, cover, bring to pressure and cook for 15 minutes.
2 Reduce pressure at room temperature. Strain off solids. Remove bay leaf and bouquet garni. Adjust seasoning. This stock should be used on the day it is made.
20–30 minutes
cooked or uncooked chicken or pork scraps
knob of fresh ginger root, sliced
sugar, to taste
salt
Proceed as for Chicken Stock but adding the ginger and sugar and salt to taste, and don’t add any vegetables on reuse. This recipe gives a basis for a large number of Chinese soups; a small quantity of the broth, together with a trace of soy sauce, can be added to most quick stir-fry dishes at the end of the cooking process.
How to Clarify a Meat Stock
It is often not necessary to clarify meat stocks unless you wish to make a special feature of a very clear appearance, as in classic consommé. However, here is the way to do it – the secret is never to let the soup boil; it must only simmer.
For every litre (13/4pts) fluid you need 1 slightly beaten egg white (reserve the egg yolk for another purpose) and a crushed eggshell.
Let stock settle and add egg white and eggshell very carefully. Slowly heat up, avoiding any turbulence in the fluid. A thick, crusty foam will form and in this you should clear a small opening to check that no boiling takes place. Simmer for 10–15 minutes and then remove from heat source. Push foam to one side and ladle out stock carefully, pouring it through a muslin cloth into a bowl while it is still hot. Cool and refrigerate. If the mixture boils up at all, cloudiness will result and you’ll have to start all over again.
Soup Thickeners
If you want a thick soup, there are various ways of achieving the desired result. The recipes that follow will give some practical applications, but here are the principal methods and the ways in which they are of use:
1 Puréeing. You simply pass the entire fluid and the meat and vegetable fragments through a sieve or into a blender. If you decide to buy a blender, don’t get the very inexpensive sort – one with a heatproof goblet will allow you to blend your soups straight from the cooker.
2 Adding flour. You can use any sort of ordinary (i.e. not self-raising) flour at the rate of 25g to 250ml (1 oz to ½pt) added at the beginning of the cooking time.
3 Roux. Equal parts of butter and flour are cooked into a white paste and then added. Or, you can add milk to the roux first to make a thickish fluid, which is then cooked for a few minutes thoroughly, to get a velouté or plain white sauce, which is used for cream of tomato and cream of asparagus soups.
4 Cornflour or arrowroot. The same results, with rather more ease, can be obtained from cornflour and also from arrowroot, neither of which are quite so prone to lumpiness as ordinary wheat flour. Flour acts as a binder for bean soups.
5 Potato. The “dirty snow storm” trick. A medium-sized potato cut up and blended while still raw into 1lt (13/4pts) water will make a very effective thickener. You can increase the amount of potato if you wish, but it bulks out in the cooking process. The effect, usually called parmentier in French cooking, gives a bulky reassuring consistency to meat and vegetable soups. Potato and leek soups are of course well known. If you don’t have a blender, the best thing to do is to use cooked mashed potato, which is then whisked into the soup with a fork either before or after the soup-cooking process. Alternatively, a single tablespoon of instant mashed potato in 500ml (1pt) hot soup will have the same effect.
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