Hacking kitchen equipment

[unixronin]

Pressure cookers are great.  They're the best way to do various things — make stock, for example, or cook suet puddings or English christmas puddings.

There's just one problem.  They invariably come with crappy strainer/steamer baskets like this one.

Let's catalog what's wrong with this thing.

Well, we could pick nits with the fact that the drain holes in it don't go all the way to the edge, causing it to trap water at the edge.  But that's a relatively minor problem.  And we could find fault with the gauge of the stainless-steel sheet it's stamped out of, which is just barely thick enough to get the job done.  But it doesn't (quite) collapse under the weight of the food in it, so it'll do.  Barely.

No, the real flaw of this thing is that totally inadequate wire bail that passes for a handle.  It's just a piece of not-particularly-stiff bent wire with the ends snapped into two holes.

First of all, it drops down flat at any excuse (yeah, that makes it REALLY easy to fish the basket of bones out of the stock, doesn't it?).  Worse than that, if the basket isn't perfectly balanced (which it seldom is) and the weight isn't below the pivot points (which it virtually NEVER is), the basket is going to tip when you start to lift it.  And since all that holds the ends in place is weak spring tension in the wire, it's very easy for one or both ends to just pop right out.  (That makes a wonderful mess if you've just lifted a chicken or turkey carcass out of a couple of quarts of hot stock, let me tell you.)  As if those weren't enough flaws, many food items you might want to put in your shiny pressure cooker just plain won't fit under that fiddly little bail in the first place.

So what are we going to do about this?

Well, let's start with that wire bail.  Here's what it looks like when it's taken off.

First we're going to cut it in half, and straighten the long leg of each half.  Then we're going to take the curved portion at the top and bend it into a finger loop.

Finally, we're going to take the two pivot ends, bend them more tightly (from a sloppy 70 degrees to a nice tight right angle), then grind them a little shorter.  We're not going to need the quarter-inch of protrusion we have now.  0.125" is going to be plenty.

Oh, and at some point during this process, we're going to twist our pieces of wire so that both ends protrude in the same direction.

By the time we're done, they'll look something like this.  What can we do with those?

Well, not much, yet.  We need to make some other changes.  Specifically, we're going to take the basket itself, and add two more holes in the rim adjacent to the existing pivot holes, like this.

(We need to do this very carefully, because stainless steel is tough and difficult to drill, and because this is very thin sheet metal.  Use a good sharp bit, clamp it down on a block of something like MDF before drilling, centerpunch first before you drill, and deburr the holes carefully afterwards.)

Now that we've got two mounting holes each side, we're going to thread our modified handles down through the rim, pop the ends through the existing pivot holes, and then we need to fasten them permanently in place.

Whatever means we use for attachment has got to be strong, food-safe, and able to stand up to extended immersion in boiling liquids at 125°C (257°F) and live steam at two atmospheres of pressure.  Welding it would be ideal, but lacking a welder, I used nickel-silver brazing.

(Besides, I said this thing was thin, and I wasn't kidding.  It's maybe .018" thick.  Welding metal that thin without blowing holes in it is not a trivial exercise.)

After we braze the handles we made in place, and do some cleanup to remove surface oxidation and flux residue with a nice well-worn piece of 400-grit wet-or-dry paper (used wet) or a Scotchbrite pad, the basket's going to look something like this.  Our new handles now stay pointing straight up where we can get at them.

And if we do a trial fit in the pressure cooker to make sure ... yup, they come just above the rim of the pressure cooker.  (Caution:   Depending on the proportions of your pressure cooker, you may need to adjust the length to get this right.  Measure first.)  They clear the lid, but can be easily grabbed with a pair of heat-resistant gloves to lift the basket and its contents out.

Most importantly, never again is your steamer basket going to tip as you try to lift it and dump your stock bones back into your stock, or dump your freshly steamed cauliflower into the sink.

(Larger, but not huge, versions of all photos are behind these.)

Comments

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

I would probably have faked it by using a colander that mostly fits. I like your solution better.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

A colander that mostly fits doesn't solve the problem ... it's even harder to get it out under control.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

http://search.live.com/cashback/products/offerings/8144/6694205

What about something like the insert portion of this?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

How would you use the handle inside the pressure cooker? If you didn't use the handle, how would you get it out?

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Me personally? I'd take three short lengths of fine chain, hook them equidistant around the rim of the strainer, and hook them to a ring in the middle.

Ring would most likely get in the food, unfortunately.

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

I usually make my stock in a stock pot, as opposed to a pressure cooker :-)

But, that still leaves the problem of having a sturdy basket.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

pressure cookers scare me ;)
guess i just need to read the directions one of these days.
still, my tendency towards absentmindedness in conjunction with their comparative unforgivingness concerns me...

a beautiful little story you tell here, though ;)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Current pressure cookers are pretty safe, really. The ancient ones made of cast aluminum with a clamp bar across the top and a pressure gauge, but no regulator, were little more than bombs.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

yeah, the one my mom gave me was like that. i didn't realized the design had been improved since then.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh hell yeah. That was the basic first-generation design. They're on the third generation now.

First generation was the big cast-alloy things with bar clamps, pressure gauge, and no regulator; second generation used rotate-to-lock lid with weights (sometimes adjustable) riding in a needle valve for pressure regulation, and usually had one or more overpressure safety blow-out devices; third generation designs replace the weights with a spring-loaded relief valve, and usually add a pressure-activated safety lock so that no matter how hard you wrench at the handles you can't open it under pressure. Ours is a Fagor 10-quart model, made in Spain I think, all stainless steel.

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

I've seen those. A great many have been retrofitted with a blow out plug and regulator.

Unmodified that would be a collector piece.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

Well done! Not only serves the purpose, but it actually looks more durable than the original design. I like it!

[kailisu.livejournal.com]

Pressure cookers come with steamer baskets?

I must have lost mine the minute I opened it up. 'cause I've never seen one.

Of course, I also got rid of the pressure cooker since it was aluminum, and hubby didn't like aluminum.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I would never buy an aluminum pressure cooker again after having owned a stainless-steel one. The drawback of stainless steel for cookware is that its poor thermal conductivity results in hot spots, but that ceased to be an issue the day you could walk into any kitchen equipment store and buy a stainless-steel pan with a quarter-inch slab of aluminum alloy explosively welded to the bottom to guarantee good heat distribution.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Some pressure cookers come with a steamer basket. The larger ones. The one I had, 5 qt, had a steamer plate.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The first pressure cooker I ever used, in the UK, was a Prestige Hi-Dome. It was a second-generation cooker in thick aluminum, twist to lock, with a 5-10-15lb regulator weight and a rubber overpressure blowout plug that had a fusible overtemperature plug in the center. It came with a steamer trivet maybe a quarter inch tall, and three baskets about 4"-5" deep that nested together (basically, each basket was a 120° arc). I don't remember whether the trivet and baskets were steel or aluminum.

It wasn't a bad design, but the bottom kept bowing and had to be periodically beaten flat again, and on at least two occasions we mashed the trivet along with the potatoes that had just been steamed. The adjustable regulator weight was a nice feature; the blowout plug, not so much - it hardened quite rapidly and probably would not have functioned as intended. Eventually it became impossible to get replacement gaskets for it (a fate which also befell my first stainless-steel pressure cooker, a second-generation Inova).