Adventures with a Beef Brisket in the Pressure Cooker

Raw brisket in the steamer basket.

My second pressure cooker meal was beef brisket.  It seemed that pressure cooker cookbooks are fond of brisket recipes, they have more brisket recipes that a standard cookbook would have.  I've never made brisket before other than a corned beef brisket in the slow cooker for St Patrick's Day, so I picked up a brisket at a recent visit to the grocery store.  I should have paid more attention, a brisket recipe takes 55 minutes of cooking, which is less than the typical 3 hours in the oven it would normally take to make, but that's a long time for a weeknight dinner.

What Recipe Should I Make?

Our kitchen is currently out of onions and it seemed that every recipe I found needed onions.  So I went with the simplest recipe from my Pressure Perfect cookbook, the brisket cooks above the water and after 55 minutes of cooking, you use two forks to shred the meat and put barbeque sauce on it.  Well, brisket and barbeque sauce are two things I've got, so that's a winner recipe. 

I cut my 2.8 pound beef brisket into four pieces and trimmed off most the fat. I put about 3 cups of water in the bottom of the pressure cooker, put the rack on top, and then put the steamer basket on the rack. Before setting up the pressure cooker with the rack, I always make sure it's already on the stove because the rack can easily slide around, which would tip an edge of the basket into the water, getting some ingredients wet. 

Seasonings. 

I put the chunks of meat in the pressure cooker basket and seasoned it with low-sodium soy sauce, celery seed, garlic powder, tomato powder, and onion powder. 

Cooked meat.  Shrinkage.

As you can see, the meat shrank quite a bit.  I always forget about that. 

The meat was a little difficult to shred, but it worked.  I think brisket might be stronger than me. 

The meat was tasty, but the seasonings I added weren't noticeable.  I probably should have marinated the meat for a few hours after cutting it into chunks, I'll try that next time. 

Shredded brisket.

Husband Jeff ate his barbeque sauced brisket on a dinner roll, while Sonny D and I ate ours right off the plate.  I think we have a new fan of Smoky Jon's barbeque sauce, Sonny D liked to delicately dip his bits of meat in it. 

Verdict

We all liked the meat a lot, but for a weeknight I'll make a quicker dish and prep the ingredients ahead of time.