Preread — Shared Rules for All Recipes

Read this once. Every recipe in this folder assumes it, so the recipes themselves only carry their own ingredients, timings, and quirks.

The bottom line

Two goals sit underneath everything else here:

Meal prep has to be incredibly easy. Load it, walk away, portion into containers. If a step is fiddly it gets designed out rather than documented around.
Two appliances do the cooking: the Dowell multipurpose cooker and an air fryer. The Dowell tenderises — pressure braising, anything that needs collagen broken down. The air fryer browns — crust, crackling, caramelised edges, roasting. No stovetop, no oven, no separate pan. The microwave assists with reheating and greens.
The division of labour between those two is the single most useful thing to understand here, and it has its own section below.

How to read these rules

Treat this folder the way you’d treat conventions in a codebase: strong defaults with stated reasons, not laws. Every rule here is written with its why attached, and that’s deliberate — the reason is what lets you tell a real exception from a lazy one.
The test is simply whether the reason still applies. Skin comes off in the braises because unbrowned skin is unpleasant to eat; skin goes into the stock because the stock gets strained and that reason evaporates. Same rule, opposite call, both correct. “I couldn’t be bothered” is not the same kind of argument.
When you do break a rule, write down which one and why, in the file that breaks it. An undocumented exception is indistinguishable from a mistake when you reread it in six months.
That said, a few things here are genuinely not negotiable, and it’s worth knowing which:
Hard — these fail badly: the cooling and storage routine (food safety); never force the lid; never lock the pressure lid while Sauté is running; never go below 3/4 cup of liquid (scorching); never pressure cook cream (it splits); no chicken breast under pressure (chalky, no graceful failure).
Soft — these are preferences with reasons: how much smell you’re willing to make; skipping the browning step; no acid in the flavour family (identity); skin off in the braises (texture); every ingredient quantity in every recipe.

The recipes

creamy-garlic-pepper-beef-mushroom.md — the tested flagship. Peppery soy-garlic beef, creamy, with mushrooms.
rosemary-garlic-pot-roast-beef.md — same beef, herby Western pot-roast direction.
beef-salpicao-style-braise.md — garlic and butter forward, dark and glossy, no cream.
creamy-garlic-mushroom-chicken.md — the creamy beef method on chicken thighs. Cheaper, much faster.
rosemary-chicken.md — rosemary, ginger, soy, and potatoes. Includes a non-pressure version.
chicken-stock.md — not a meal. An ingredient that replaces the water in any recipe above.
Sweet-savoury East Asian — all untested, all in the branch where sugar or mirin is structural:
char-siu.md — Chinese barbecue pork, air-fryer only. Strips marinated, roasted, and lacquered in thin glaze stages. No pressure stage.
bulgogi.md — Korean marinated beef, thin-sliced and air fried in batches. No pressure stage.
mongolian-beef.md — cornstarch-coated beef air fried crisp, then folded through a reduced soy-ginger sauce. Two appliances, no pressure stage.
lu-rou-fan.md — Taiwanese braised pork belly over rice. Hand-diced, 20 min at pressure, reduced to a sticky topping. The cheapest dish in the folder.
hong-shao-rou.md — Chinese red-braised pork belly. Two-day recipe: 25 min at pressure, chilled overnight, then air-fryer glaze.
buta-no-kakuni.md — Japanese braised pork belly. 30 min at pressure. Cleaner and less spiced than hong-shao-rou.md — no star anise, no garlic.
nikujaga.md — Japanese beef and potato braise. 8 min at pressure, thin beef poached in afterwards. The leanest dish here.
jjimdak.md — Korean soy-braised chicken with potato, carrot, and dried chilli. 8 min at pressure. Glass noodles cooked per portion at serving.
All the dishes are sized for 6 servings. chicken-stock.md is the exception — it yields about 11 portions of 3/4 cup, each one being exactly one recipe’s worth.

Smell — a cost you can choose to pay

This folder was originally written for a studio apartment where cooking smell had nowhere to go, and that assumption shaped every recipe in it. That constraint has since relaxed: there’s a carbon-filter air purifier now, and an apartment that occasionally smells like food is an acceptable outcome.
So smell is no longer a hard limit. It’s a cost — spend it when it buys something real, like a crust or crackling, and don’t spend it out of carelessness.

Browning is now genuinely on the table, in the air fryer or on Sauté. The existing five braises were all written to avoid it and buy the depth back through butter, cream, mushrooms, and oyster or Worcestershire sauce. They’re still good that way, but every one of them would be improved by browning the meat first, and that’s now a fair trade rather than a rule violation.
Never quick-release — this one survives intact, and for reasons that were never mainly about smell. In the chicken recipes the slow release is part of the cooking. In chicken-stock.md a fast release flashes the liquid to a boil and clouds the stock. Smell was only ever the third reason.
Still worth doing when you care: crack a window and point a fan out of it before you start, and leave the lid on for an extra 20–30 minutes after pressure drops. Aromatics scale hard with temperature, so opening at 70°C is a much smaller event than opening at 95°C.
Recipes written before this change still say things like “the braises go in cold and raw.” Read those as the low-smell version rather than the only version.

Your cooker — Dowell electric pressure cooker

Set the time manually. Press the program button (Meat/Stew for beef, Poultry or Meat/Stew for chicken), then press Pressure Time to set the minutes. The preset defaults are far too short for beef and are not what these recipes assume.
There is no Sealing/Venting switch. The lid seals via the weighted valve sitting on the vent stem. Seat it properly and the float valve does the rest.
Turn Keep Warm off as soon as pressure drops. It holds the food near simmer, which keeps cooking it and stops it cooling.
Never force the lid. If it won’t open, pressure hasn’t fully dropped.

The Sauté function — what it’s good at and what it isn’t

Sauté works, and the cooker will brown. The reason the braises avoid it is smell, not capability. But it has a real shape, and knowing it in advance saves disappointment:
Good at: small quantities of aromatics and anything at the finish. Frying garlic slices in butter, sweating sliced onion and carrot, blooming dried herbs in fat, melting butter into a sauce, cooking out a cornstarch slurry, boiling a sauce down. Those are the jobs it’s used for across this folder, and it does all of them fine.
Bad at: searing a kilo of anything. The heat is weak and non-adjustable, and the inner pot is deep and narrow, so moisture pools instead of evaporating. Past a thin single layer you get steaming rather than browning, and you’d be working in batches for a long stretch to get a mediocre result. Crisping potatoes fails for the same reason. Use the air fryer for both.
So: use it for finishing and small aromatic work. Don’t plan a recipe around it delivering a hard sear — that’s the air fryer’s job now.
Never lock the pressure lid while Sauté is running. If you want a lid during simmering, rest it on unlatched, or use a plain pot lid or a plate.

The air fryer, and the two-stage pattern

The air fryer does the one thing the Dowell genuinely cannot: dry, high heat on a surface. Crust, crackling, caramelised glaze, roasted vegetables, and anything that needs to be crisp rather than tender.
The two appliances split cleanly, and the split is worth internalising:

Dowell — breaks down collagen, tenderises tough cuts, extracts flavour into liquid, makes sauce. Cannot brown, cannot crisp, cannot cook anything below well-done.
Air fryer — browns, crisps, glazes, and roasts. Can cook to medium-rare. Cannot tenderise a tough cut; connective tissue needs time and moisture, which dry heat doesn’t provide.
The two-stage pattern is where most of the new value is: pressure cook until tender, then finish in the air fryer for texture. Ribs, pork belly, pulled pork, and anything that wants a glaze all work this way, and neither appliance can produce that result alone.
The reverse pattern also matters: brown first, then braise. Any of the existing five recipes can be improved by browning the meat in the air fryer before it goes into the pot.
Two practical notes. The air fryer is small, so anything at this folder’s 6-serving scale gets cooked in batches — budget the time. And it’s the best reheating tool you have for anything that should be crisp; the microwave rule in the storage section applies to saucy braises, not to crusted or glazed food.

Salt calibration

All soy quantities assume Datu Puti at 1043 mg sodium per tbsp, which is about 2.65 g of salt equivalent per tablespoon. That is on the salty end — above Kikkoman — so don’t assume another bottle behaves the same. Datu Puti ships in more than one formulation and the labels vary by up to 3x. If you change brands, read the label and recalculate.
The target is roughly 0.8% salinity across the whole pot. That reads slightly salty on its own, deliberately, so it still tastes seasoned once plain rice dilutes it.

Water: the rule that trips people up

3/4 cup is the cooker’s minimum to generate steam. It is not a ratio to the meat, and it does not scale.
Meat releases a large amount of its own water under pressure. If you double the meat, keep the water at 3/4 cup. Doubling the water just doubles the excess liquid you’ll have to remove later.
Never go below 3/4 cup either — too little liquid means scorching instead of pressurizing.
The best thing you can do with that 3/4 cup is make it something other than water. Since the volume is fixed no matter what, filling it with stock instead is free flavour and free body — see chicken-stock.md.
The one exception to the rule is chicken-stock.md itself, where water is the product rather than just the medium for making steam. That recipe uses close to 2 litres. Don’t carry that number back to any of the braises.

Timing: what scales and what doesn’t

Pressure time does not scale with quantity. It tracks the thickness of the individual pieces. Same size cubes, same minutes, whether it’s 500 g or 1 kg.
Come-to-pressure and natural release do scale, because there’s more mass to heat and cool. At 1 kg expect roughly 25 minutes to reach pressure and 25–30 minutes to release, so about 90 minutes hands-off for a beef recipe start to finish.

Loading the pot

Liquids and seasonings first, stirred once.
Meat and aromatics on top. Do not stir again.
Keeping sugars and thick sauces off the base is what prevents scorching. These cookers have no burn sensor to save you.
Check the max fill line before starting, especially when adding potatoes.

Fixing a thin sauce

The pot will look soupy when you open it. That’s normal — the meat released its water. Deal with it before adding any cream, because cream dilutes whatever you already have.
Fast and reversible: ladle the excess into a mug and keep it. Bring the level to just below the top of the meat, since cream adds volume back. Ladling from the top removes floating fat too. If you overshoot or it ends up under-seasoned, pour some back.
Note that ladling does not change the concentration — what’s left tastes exactly like what you just tasted. Adding cream without ladling first does weaken it.
Better result, slightly more work: lift the meat out into a bowl. Pour the liquid into a tall narrow jar and let it sit 5 minutes — the fat rises into a thick layer you can spoon off cleanly. In a wide pot the same fat spreads into a thin film that’s nearly impossible to chase. Return the defatted liquid, thicken, then return the meat.
Cornstarch slurry: 1 tbsp cornstarch stirred into 2 tbsp cold water. Add on Sauté and cook 1–2 minutes until glossy. Always do this before the cream, since the slurry needs near-boiling heat that cream can’t tolerate.
Boiling it down concentrates flavour in a way ladling doesn’t, but it’s open-pot steam. Worth it only when you want a clinging sauce.

Dairy rule

Never pressure cook cream, and never hard-boil it. It splits and scorches. Cream goes in last, with the heat off, after any thickening is done. Butter is more forgiving but also belongs at the end.

Vegetables

General rule: hard and dense goes in at the start, green and delicate goes in at the end.
Potatoes — quartered, in at the start. In a 35-minute beef recipe they partly dissolve and their starch thickens the sauce, which is useful when you have excess liquid. In an 8-minute chicken recipe they hold their shape.
Carrots — 5 mm coins simmered in the finished sauce on Sauté for 6–8 minutes, lid resting on top unlocked. Thick chunks need 20+ minutes, so cut thin. Done this way they absorb sauce flavour. At 35 minutes under pressure they disintegrate.
Broccoli, green beans, and other greens — never in the pressure cooker. They go drab and mushy, and overcooked cruciferous vegetables release strong sulfur compounds, which is exactly the lingering smell you’re avoiding. Microwave covered with a splash of water for 3–4 minutes and stir in at serving. Covered microwave is the lowest-odor cooking method you have.
Mushrooms — canned, drained and rinsed; the brine tastes tinny. They only need warming through at the end. Whole is better than sliced, and needs no knife. 35 minutes under pressure turns them to grey mush and waters down the sauce.

Aromatics: how much is too much

Garlic has enormous headroom when left whole. Harshness comes from a compound that only forms when garlic is cut or crushed, and which breaks down with heat. Whole cloves cooked long go soft, sweet, and nutty — closer to roasted garlic. 10 cloves is moderate; 20 is assertive but still pleasant. The failure mode at genuinely excessive amounts is heaviness and a pasty sauce, not sharpness. Minced garlic behaves completely differently and turns acrid, which is why these recipes use whole cloves.
Onion has much less headroom. It dissolves into the sauce, which does three things: turns it sweet and pulpy, thickens it, and dilutes your salt with released water. Sweetness also suppresses the perception of black pepper — so heavy onion works directly against a pepper-forward dish. Be measured here and generous with garlic.
Black pepper: use crushed peppercorns, not pre-ground. Measure a little more generously than a ground-pepper recipe would, since crushed pepper has air gaps. Keep a pinch back for the end — the heat survives long cooking, but the bright aromatics fade and can drift musty, so a fresh crack at the finish restores them.
Herbs: rosemary, thyme, and bay survive pressure cooking. Basil, parsley, and cilantro turn to grey sludge — add those at the end if at all.

Flavour family — what belongs here and what doesn’t

This is a taste preference, not a technique constraint, and it’s the most important thing to get right before proposing a new recipe.
In: rich, savoury, garlic- and butter-forward, umami-driven. Western braises and East Asian soy braises both qualify. Working reference points — dishes actually liked: rosemary chicken, beef salpicao, beef with mushroom, chicken pastel, roast beef, Texas-style pork ribs, Korean beef, Mongolian beef, Japanese sukiyaki.
Out: sour and funky. Vinegar-forward anything, and fermented-fish seasonings like bagoong or heavy patis. Soy plus vinegar plus garlic is adobo, and that sour tang is precisely what’s being avoided — it’s the reason this rule exists. Thin gingery comfort broths and rice porridges are also out. Don’t propose them.
This is about flavour, not cuisine. Salpicao and pastel are both Filipino-Spanish and both are welcome. The dividing line runs through the taste, not the country — don’t use nationality as a proxy in either direction.
Two branches, and sugar is the tell:

Pepper-forward savoury — the original six recipes. No sugar, because sweetness directly suppresses the perception of black pepper.
Sweet-savoury East Asian — char-siu, bulgogi, mongolian-beef, lu-rou-fan, hong-shao-rou, buta-no-kakuni, nikujaga, jjimdak. Here sugar or mirin is structural, not optional. Don’t also make these pepper-forward; the two fight each other.
If a finished dish tastes flat, reach for salt, pepper, butter, or (in the sweet-savoury branch) a little more sugar — not acid.

Cooling, storage, and meal prep

This is the part with an actual safety consequence, so don’t improvise it.

Turn Keep Warm off.
Lift the inner pot out of the cooker housing. The housing is an insulator and will hold the food hot for hours. This single step matters more than anything else here.
Sit the pot in a sink with a few inches of cold water for 20–30 minutes, stirring occasionally, refreshing the water if it warms. You want it merely warm, not cold.
Split the batch into two shallow containers, then refrigerate promptly while still slightly warm, loosely covered. Wide and shallow cools much faster than the deep cooker insert. A tight lid traps heat. Do not leave food out to reach room temperature on its own.
Next morning, lift the solidified fat off in one piece. This is the main thing that determines whether you still want to eat portions 4, 5, and 6. It also removes the fat that carries smell into fabric. Do this from the whole batch before dividing, not from six separate containers.
Then portion.
Cooling target: refrigerate within 2 hours of finishing. For a measurable standard, cool from 57°C to 21°C within 2 hours and to 5°C within 6 hours total. If a deep batch is not cooling fast enough, divide it into more shallow containers and refresh the ice bath.
Keeps 3–4 days refrigerated. Six servings exceeds that window, so freeze half on day one rather than trusting day five.
Reheat covered in the microwave. It’s the lowest-smell option available to you, which matters when you’re doing it repeatedly in a small space. Sauces containing cream may look separated when cold; they come back together when reheated and stirred.