Pressure Cooking

You may remember me talking about my mother-in-law (MIL) giving me a pressure cooker for my birthday! My MIL can cook! She makes such great dishes and always uses a pressure cooker. I was a little nervous about using one, but decided I would love to have one for my birthday! I wanted to document and blog my first experience of cooking with it!

Here she is!



I wanted to start with making chicken...a whole one!!! I started by gutting and trimming some of the fat off the chicken. I made sure to cut off the tail, because it was just gross! Then I washed the chicken really well!

After trimming and rinsing I placed the whole chicken in the pressure cooker and filled it with water about half way.

I locked the lid in place and put the cooker on the stove on high heat.

Once it started to jiggle I cut the heat down to where it only jiggled every now and then. Once I cut the heat down I set the timer for 15 minutes.

Since it was the first time I used the pressure cooker with my stove, I started a timer from the beginning. I found that it took about 20 minutes for the cooker to get "pressurized" and 15 minutes to cook the chicken....not bad!!!


After cooking the chicken I placed the pressure cooker under small stream of running water to help cool it faster. My pressure cooker has a lock, so you cannot open it until the pressure has released.

Here is the cooked chicken and broth!

I poured the chicken juice (broth) into jars.

And then had to work on de-boning/shredding the chicken.

Ta da!!! Altogether I was able to get 6 cups of good chicken meat from the chicken!

I will be making chicken and dumplins tomorrow from the broth and cooked chicken!