Cooking times:

Beef bones @ 15lbs. covered with water for 45 mins. (vs. 3-4 hours in regular pot.

Pork bones @15lbs. covered with water for 30 mins. (vs. 3-4 hours in regular pot.

Poultry bones @15 lbs. covered with water for 12-25 mins. (vs. 45 mins in regular pot)

Dave

So, I dug out my old Presto pressure cooker, found the pdf manual online, and decided to make some beef broth. The manual recipe is for beef soup (says to strain later for broth), and calls for cooking for only 12 minutes. The recipe is for a 4qt cooker; mine is a 6qt and it says to adjust the recipe by 1.5x. Doesn't say anything about adjusting the cooking time.

It seems that every beef stock recipe I find online, no matter what type of pressure cooker, calls for a much longer cooking time than 12 minutes. They all say something like 45 - 75 min.

What is with the 12 minutes? Is that correct? Should I increase it to Dave's suggestions? Is that just rocking time on my old-fashioned first-generation PC and maybe everyone else's time is the total time? Or what?

First, it is never recommend to use PC manuals for canning instructions, cooking only if you want but there are better sources. They are too outdated for canning instructions.

Second, you are talking about cooking in this instance but are comparing the times for making soup with to making stock. Soup and stock aren't the same thing. Stock is much thicker, less watery, more intense flavored, and has a higher fat content.

The end goals for soup and stock are very different. The soup instructions are for a way of quickly making soup with the meat still in a good tasting form. But the goal for making stock is to get as much of the flavor and marrow cooked out of the meat and bones and into the stock and the water reduced somewhat. So yes, the cooking times when making stock will always be much longer than when making a soup.

Now obviously if you don't want to cook that long for stock that is your choice. But then you'd be canning soup and not stock.

Hope this helps.

Dave

Here's the recipe in the Presto cooker manual. Clearly, Presto thinks the only difference in soup and stock is that soup keeps the solid ingredients! Just dump them out and you have stock. ;-)

As we discussed in the other thread on this question stock is normally made from a carcass or a bunch of bones. Normally those bones have only a minimal amount of meat on them. And the times I gave in the post and what you have found on the web instructions for stock were for making stock with a carcass or bones, NOT for cooking meat. If what you are cooking is a bunch of beef bones then yes 45 mins. minimum is what is recommended.

But if you are cooking say a roast, cut up into 1 inch cubes and you want the meat to be served as a meal and still be edible then you would cook it for the meat time.

If you are trying to kill 2 birds with one stone, cook a meal and get some broth at the same time then you'd cook for the meat time. You'd end up with some watery broth, not stock.

Dave