Kielbasa, cabbage, potatoes

In a pressure cooker. Let's watch Debbie and see where she goes wrong.

Boy, this is frustrating. I looked through scores of videos, possibly a hundred,  and none do the way that I do it. Most use a very fast method. All that is needed is time to cook the vegetables. Women use two heads of cabbage, which seems like a lot, and a boatload of potatoes. Some omit onion.

Debbie made a video without having done this before.

A long time ago a young man half my own age told me he was braising sausages. I asked him what braising means. He told me slow baking in covered pot with scant water so moisture fogs in the pot, steams the protein and rains over the thing that you are cooking. "Like a crock pot?" He said, "Sort of. Yeah."

I cut kielbasa shaped like a U into large sandwich-size chunks but that was only so they could be turned and singed all around. First step in building additional flavor. Then added water to steam them, not boil them. A rather large pile in my largest pot. And let them cook slowly on low stovetop for hours until softened. Testing along the way. So the pile diminishes as I go because I'm eating portions of the chunks. When they're done, then the vegetables are added. On the bottom. Cooked and softened kielbasa on top. So all that fog and drizzling rain inside the pot drips through the sausage to cover the vegetables.

Without any additional flavoring, no salt, no pepper, no cayenne, nothing, the spices inside the sausages permeate everything and flavoring the water, plenty of spices inside the sausages to spread all around resulting in the most delicious liquid ever that can be sipped straight like exceedingly flavorful broth. And all the vegetables contributing their own flavors and accepting the spices rained up them.

All the fast ways work fine and everyone is happy. The video uploaders say it's their family's favorite thing. Their sausages are cut into bite-size pieces and when they chew them there will be some resistance. But braised for hours then the casings melt producing a sort of sticky surface and the meat is so tender it veritably melts in your mouth with near zero resistance. They no longer have the familiar texture of sausage or hotdogs. Nothing at all like sausage that's grilled.  Braising changes them into something else entirely. While the vegetables cooked much shorter period maintain their individual textures.

Some cooks us sauerkraut that adds vinegar. Some finish with wine. If a touch of vinegar is added to finish then I'd consider a touch of something sweet to go with it, braised onion, for one, or a touch of sugar for sweet/sour balance. Then, after all that long slow cooking, something fresh like tomato or cucumber and crispy lettuce on the same plate to go back and forth.

I bought one of these new style pressure cookers. We'll see how it goes. I use the regular pressure cooker quite a lot for things that you might not expect, and it's brilliant. It is the largest pot that I own and at first I thought it might be better if I have a smaller one too. Then I realized its size is no setback. The large pot can be used for small batches. So, for the new version that you see advertised all over the place, I upscaled to the large size. Debbie is cooking for her family of five and I am cooking for myself. Still, the large size is better because those leftovers are fantastic. The regular pressure pot makes a huge batch of chicken broth from collected bones in nothing flat. An amazing improvement and an impressive savings. I'd like the new one to do the same thing. Plus, the very small version are cheap, say, for an individual batch of beans or rice or frozen chicken breast or couple of chicken thighs.

I notice that cooks dump salt and pepper all the time in one spot. It'll dissolve and distribute. But wouldn't it be better to sprinkle evenly throughout? It just seems like it would. With bread dough I keep visualizing salt killing the yeast that it lands on.

All the pressure pot actually does is increase the temperature of boiling water. Like boiling food below sea-level. Like cooking in a bathysphere thousands of feet under the sea. The water has to get really hot before it boils and turns into steam. Then the steam is trapped and steam and water are the same temperature. At 15 lbs pressure the water and steam are 250℉. As a general rule, increasing temperature by 10°C (to 230℉) doubles the rate of reaction, halving the time of completion, increasing to  20°C (to 248℉) quarters the time it would take to cook something at 212℉. How in the world did they figure this out? Science!

Man, these scientists sure are smart.