When you have little time to cook but still want to serve a well-prepared and delicious dish, stew in a pressure cooker can be a great solution. The pressure cooker, in fact, is a valuable ally for obtaining exquisite foods – a succulent roast, a creamy risotto or an excellent meat broth – in very little time. And the results are practically identical: the stew in a pressure cooker, for example, is creamy and very tender, almost melting in your mouth! It is essential, of course, to get the right cooking time and the correct amount of liquids to add to the pot. For this reason, the recipe for stew cooked in a pressure cooker that I am showing you today can be considered a “basic recipe”, meaning that this is the recipe to start from if you don’t know where to begin preparing a stew in a pressure cooker; it is therefore a simple and excellent recipe as it is, but you can also enrich and vary it according to your tastes (at the end of the recipe I leave you some suggestions).
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- Difficulty: Very Easy
- Cost: Very Economical
- Preparation time: 10 Minutes
- Portions: 4 people
- Cooking methods: Pressure Cooker
- Cuisine: Italian
- Seasonality: All Seasons
- Energy 632.13 (Kcal)
- Carbohydrates 3.76 (g) of which sugars 0.30 (g)
- Proteins 47.05 (g)
- Fat 44.56 (g) of which saturated 17.65 (g)of which unsaturated 19.44 (g)
- Fibers 0.16 (g)
- Sodium 526.32 (mg)
Indicative values for a portion of 240 g processed in an automated way starting from the nutritional information available on the CREA* and FoodData Central** databases. It is not food and / or nutritional advice.
* CREATES Food and Nutrition Research Center: https://www.crea.gov.it/alimenti-e-nutrizione https://www.alimentinutrizione.it ** U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central, 2019. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov
Ingredients to Prepare the Stew in the Pressure Cooker
- 2.2 lbs veal (or beef or pork)
- 2 tbsps all-purpose flour (or rice flour for celiacs)
- 2 tbsps extra virgin olive oil
- 1 oz butter
- 2 cloves garlic
- to taste salt
- to taste pepper
- 1 sprig rosemary
- A few leaves sage
- 1/4 cup dry white wine
- 3.4 fl oz vegetable broth (6 fl oz if using beef, as the cooking time is longer)
Tools
- 1 Cutting Board
- 1 Knife
- 1 Pressure Cooker 7 liters
- 1 Bowl large
How to Cook the Stew in the Pressure Cooker
To prepare the stew in a pressure cooker, you can use veal, pork, or beef: the procedure is the same, what changes is the cooking time, since beef requires 15 more minutes, and consequently the amount of broth (6 fl oz instead of 3.4).
Cut the meat into fairly large pieces (about 1.2 inches on each side) (1). Put them in a bowl and season them with a good pinch of salt and a grind of pepper (2).
Add a couple of tablespoons of flour (if you are celiac, use rice flour) (3). Mix thoroughly with your hands to coat all the meat well with flour (4).
Pour the oil into the bottom of the pressure cooker and add the butter in pieces and the peeled garlic (5). Turn on the heat to a low flame and let the garlic brown slightly. Then add the meat (6).
Brown it over low heat for about 5 minutes, turning it occasionally, until it is colored on all sides (7).
Then raise the flame and deglaze with the white wine (8). Stir and let it evaporate for about a minute, then pour in the hot broth (9).
Mix well (10) and add the sage leaves and chopped rosemary. Close the pot with the airtight lid and wait for it to reach pressure and start whistling.
When the pot starts to whistle, lower the flame just enough to maintain a constant whistle. At this point, cook the stew in the pressure cooker for 10 minutes from the whistle if using veal or pork, 25 minutes for beef.
After the cooking time, turn off the heat and open the valve to release the steam. Only when the safety valve has lowered can you open the pot (do so carefully, so as not to burn yourself with the steam that will escape). Your stew will be perfectly cooked and will have formed a delicious thick and creamy sauce (11)
You can serve the stew immediately, alone or accompanied by some polenta, mashed potatoes, or some pilaf rice.
How long does the stew keep?
You can keep the stew in the refrigerator for about 3 days.
Tips and Variations
When deglazing the meat with wine, be careful that it is never refrigerator-cold, but at room temperature: this way, you will avoid dangerous splashes.
If you prefer to prepare a stew with sauce in the pressure cooker, proceed according to the recipe – possibly replacing the garlic with a mix of carrot, celery, and onion – and add 5 oz of tomato puree along with the broth.
If you wish, you can add mushrooms to your pressure cooker stew (just sauté them quickly in the pot before adding the meat) or peas, which you can add with the broth, or even potatoes: in this case, cut them into cubes of the same size as the meat and brown them with the stew but increase the amount of broth to 6 fl oz while keeping the cooking time unchanged.
