Perfecting the Technique

Day 2: I have said it many times: the internet is the world's largest source of MISinformation, and with that lead-in, I'm going to tell you how I arrived at the perfect artichoke. To begin, I have always made artichokes in a pressure cooker, 15 pounds pressure for 20 minutes, but my 50-year old pressure cooker needed a new gasket, and because it was so old and the gaskets so hard to find, it would have almost been cheaper to buy a new pressure cooker. Instead, I fell for the sucker-bait and bought an InstaPot. Then I started looking for how to cook artichokes in it. Almost every recipe I found said, "Cook for 5 minutes, and vent naturally," so I tried that. What I got was a warm, raw artichoke. The InstaPot and I had a few arguments about being re-started, but eventually I won and gave the artichoke another 10 minutes, thinking that surely, that would be long enough, given the slow cool-down in addition to the cooking time. Nope. Artichoke was too tough to scrape the "goodie" off the leaves with my teeth. Back in the IP it went, for another 10 minutes plus cool-down. And then it was edible. It had taken me roughly an hour and a quarter to cook one damn artichoke.

Understand something: I'm not knocking InstaPot. It's good for a lot of things, quinoa for one. But to my way of thinking at that particular moment, it was absolutely worthless for artichokes. The next time I wanted to make one, I dragged out the pressure cooker, soaked the stiff old gasket in warm water to soften it, but that was no help. It never sealed. My artichoke got cooked, but of course it took longer, and I wasn't comfortable with the idea of having a bad gasket holding even a small amount of pressure. I decided to give the InstaPot another go, using a method which seemed more logical to me. Originally, I'd put it on "steam," but I saw that it had a "pressure cook" setting. I set the pressure to "high," cooked the artichokes for 30 minutes (based on prior experience), and let the pot vent naturally (roughly another 15 minutes). And y'know what? I got good artichokes. Took substantially longer, but they were cooked properly. Satisfied that I'd won the argument at last, I went out and bought myself a new pressure cooker.