With today’s advancement in technology and kitchen gadgets, nobody can completely get away with the excuses, “I don’t have enough time to cook”, or “I can’t cook!”
There is literally a fool proof solution to both of these! If you think you can’t cook or simply don’t have enough time to fix anything up more than your frozen pizza or instant ramen, think again!
Collard greens are a ‘vegetable’ side dish staple of the southern folks, but you can also find them at your grocery store my PNW friends! 🙂 I personally got mine from WinCo for less than 2 dollars a bunch. I’ve had collard greens before from different BBQ joints, but they were really mushy, soggy, and had no bite or appeal. But this recipe will yield really tender collard greens without compromising texture, you can still make out the leaves!
This is going to be the best 4 ingredient, 60 minute collard green dish of your life! We’re going to be using a smoked ham hock and some smoked pork jowl bacon (cheekbone), some onions, and our collard greens!
Prep Steps:
- De-stem your collard greens. Take a sharp knife and run it down the stem separating the leafy part from the stem part.
- Cut your leaves roughly in 1 inch segments and wash thoroughly! Do not work on draining your washed collard greens too much. We want to keep the remaining water for our cooking.
- Dice up some onions and some smoked pork jowl bacon
- Cut up your smoke pork hock in large chunks (or not – up to you)
Pressure Cooker Steps:
I use a 6 quart InstaPot and so my directions may be slightly off to your pressure cooker, just make do because everything is super forgiving here heh.
- Put your pressure cooker to Saute mode.
- Throw in your diced smoke pork jowl bacon and saute letting the fat render out
- Add in your diced onions, saute for a few minutes to let the onions get a little bit translucent
- throw in your collard greens. Really stuff them down if its a bit tight of a squeeze.
- Add half a cup of water and set your pressure cooker to high pressure (stew mode for me) for 60 minutes.
Since the smokey salty flavor is really robust, no salt is needed in this. Just let your smoked meats do its job. When time is up, I let it sit for about 10-15 minutes and use a wet cloth to carefully switch my vent to release pressure. When its done with its hissing I know its safe to open up my pressure cooker.
I like to take tongs to remove the collard greens making sure to tear the meats in nice bite size portions and mixing in as I go and I typically discard the excess liquid.
Take a bite out of that folks!