The Key To Cooking The Best Greens? Just Keep It Simple

There's a reason a heaping helping of greens is reserved for holidays or extended family meals on many an American supper table. A quick internet search shows most of the top recipes take two to three hours or more. That's with at least one major outlet claiming they can wash, de-stem, and chop 3 pounds of collard greens plus chop ham, onions, and garlic and measure out all their other ingredients in 20 minutes.

Forget having grandma's famous collard greens recipe on a weeknight. If you want greens on a Wednesday, you either need a can opener or a better way. That better way is with a pressure cooker and prep-less ingredients like prechopped greens, peeled or chopped garlic, and store-bought smoked ham hocks.

Whether you like collards, mustards, turnips, or a combo, you can have salty, savory, flavorful greens swimming in potlikker (that's "pot liquor" for the uninitiated) on the table in as little as a ½ hour. And you only need a can opener if that's how your stock comes.

You can use any greens recipe you love or whatever ingredients you have. The method is the key. Instant pots and other devices like it use gas (steam) pressure to add loads of flavor by concentrating and intensifying every ingredient in less time than you could get on the stovetop. Much like on the stovetop, you can kill the flavor by overcooking it, though that's harder with modern pressure-regulated devices.

With most devices, you can build flavor by sautéing ingredients right in the pressure cooker before putting the lid on. That said, you can also add them without sautéing to save time. The only part of the flavor you'll miss is from the Maillard reaction (browning), though adding some smoky pork to the mix will help counteract that.

The cooking time of your greens depends entirely on your meat of choice and the desired tenderness of the greens. You can go on high pressure for as little as 10 minutes for a couple of slices of bacon or pre-sautéd meat for greens that still have a bit of bite. But if you're using a ham hock or want very tender greens, go for at least 30 minutes and up to 45 or until an instant-read thermometer shows a temperature of 145 degrees Fahrenheit or higher on the ham hock.

Since prepping greens is tedious and time-consuming, buy prechopped and washed greens instead. For example, HEB sells 2-pound bags of collard greens that you can dump straight into the pressure cooker. If you can't find that, your next best bet is frozen greens. They're flash-frozen just after harvest, so they're just as good, though the freezing process impacts the finished texture. 

As for bacon or salt pork, it only takes about 5 or 10 minutes to sauté them along with the onions and garlic, and you get substantially more flavor out of them. Or places like WinCo and HEB sell ham hocks (sometimes smoked), and you only have to toss those in, even if they're frozen. It increases the overall cooking time, but there's less active time associated with it. 

You can also save time by opting for frozen or prepped onions and garlic. To skip the sauté step, just toss raw ones in whole or in chunks, or use dried or minced onion and garlic. You can keep it vegan while building flavor with vegetable stock instead of chicken stock or water.