Among the most important culinary innovations of the last hundred years or so has been using a pressure cooker. Actually invented in the seventeenth century by French physicist Denis Papin, it achieved widespread popularity in the 1950s and made possible many new kinds of cookery. You can find an abundance of pressure cooker recipe books and meal ideas using a pressure cooker in a few simple clicks.

The popularity of the pressure cooker, however, has actually waned slightly since this period, thanks to competition from other devices like the microwave. Let’s take a closer look at this device, and see how we might get the best from it.

Using A Pressure Cooker

What is a pressure cooker?

A pressure cooker works by sealing a vessel. This means that boiling can’t occur until the temperature gets higher than 100°C. Modern pressure cookers also come with a range of safety features that prevent the vessel from bursting, or from being opened while it’s under pressure.

Reduces cooking time

This effectively means that foods you might have simmered over a long period can be cooked quickly. For example, with the pressure at 1 bar relative to the ambient pressure, the boiling point is raised to 121 degrees, which will cut the cooking time to a quarter.

As such, the pressure cooker makes it possible to whip up something substantial even if you only have an hour or two to spare in the evening.

Foods retain their nutrients in pressure cookers

Spending a long time in boiling water will leech many of the nutrients and flavours away from the food being boiled. As such, pressure cooking allows boiled vegetables and other ingredients to retain their qualities for longer.

Saves energy

A pressure cooker will limit the amount of steam escaping from the pan. This means less wasted energy and vastly superior energy efficiency. If you’re looking for a way to limit your spending on your hob, in other words, this is a great way to do it.

Generally speaking, any recipe that can be cooked in a slow cooker, or a single pan, will lend itself to a pressure cooker. This means stews, soups, ragus, pulled-meat sauces and chillis will all work nicely. If you’re making your own stocks, it’s also brilliant. Cook everything in big batches and then freeze it for later thawing. With that said, the versatility means that it can be used for other dishes, too.

The simplicity of using a pressure cooker

If you’re cooking with one then you don’t need to worry about washing multiple pots and pans. You can create brilliant dishes using just one pot.

What’s more, you can be sure that you won’t get any spillage onto the splashback. Open pans, even at low temperatures, tend to deposit a sticky veneer of grime across nearby surfaces. Often it can spread over the entire kitchen. This is not the case when it comes to pressure cookers.

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