Janet A. zimmerman - The Healthy Pressure Cooker Cookbook

Copyright 2015 by Sonoma Press, Berkeley, California

The author wishes to thank Matt South, Robyne Fullagar, and the rest of the staff at The Cooks Warehouse for answering questions and allowing her to check out equipment.

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Cover photography Offset/Andrew Purcell; Interior photography Stockfood/Michael Marquand,

ISBN: Print 978-1-942411-23-9 | eBook 978-1-942411-24-6

To my mother, who taught me how to cook; my sister, Eileen, with whom I shared an Easy Bake Oven; and Dave, my partner in cooking, teaching, and everything, who edits my prose, tests my recipes, cleans up my messes, and keeps me sane.

D epending on your age and how much time you spent in the kitchen with your mother or grandmother, you may remember a big, noisy pot on the stove with what looked like a small weather vane on top. As the pot heated up, the top would begin spitting, hissing, and wheezing like an asthmatic cobra.

Stand back, just in case the top blows! my mother would warn us. What? we thought. Pots exploding in the kitchen? Cooking is that dangerous?

As far as I know, my mothers pressure cooker never lost its top, but those early versions really could be dangerous. Even if you never saw one blow up, the threat was frightening enough to keep an entire generation of cooks away from pressure cookers. And if we werent scared, we were mystified. It seemed to me that once my mother put an assortment of raw ingredients into her pot, closed the lid, and turned on the heat, magic started to happen inside. A while later, shed breathe a sigh of relief that the pot was still in one piece before dazzling us with a completed dinner.

Even after I learned how a pressure cooker works, my fear and awe remainedand I know Im not the only American cook who felt that way. While other culinary cultures embraced the pressure cooker, it remained for years an oddity in the US kitchen. But as modern pressure cookers have become safer and easier to use, and cooking healthy meals on a time-restrained schedule has grown more important than ever, weve started to reembrace it fully.

A pressure cooker changes the boiling point of water. At high pressure inside most modern pressure cookersbetween 9 and 15 pounds per square inch (psi)the boiling point is raised from 212F (100C) to as high as 248F (120C). This temperature results not only in faster cooking times but in more flavor, as the physical reactions that produce new flavor molecules happen faster at higher temperatures. So, not only is your pressure-braised meat tender in less time, its also as flavorful as it would be had it simmered in the oven for hours.

Even after I realized how much time a pressure cooker could save me, I was hesitant to add one to my kitchen. I remembered the soups and stews my mother created with hers, and frankly, those dishes didnt entice me. Living alone, the last thing I wanted taking up refrigerator space was a big batch of split pea soup or beef stew. But mostly I was hung up on the idea that anything I cooked in a pressure cooker had to be a start-to-finish meal. That is, everything would go in at once, and when the lid came off, that was it. Those kinds of recipes just werent in my repertoire.

Then I saw a demonstration of pressure cookers at a cookware store. The cook started a risotto dish the usual waysauting onions and arborio rice in butter, then adding wine to reducebefore adding broth and locking on the lid. After releasing the pressure, she finished the dish with butter and cheese. The finished dish took 6 to 7 minutes to prepareversus the usual 30 minuteswithout the constant stirring normally required. That was my kind of cooking.

Thanks to their time-saving, energy-saving, and nutrient-preserving qualities combined, pressure cookers are enjoying a resurgence in popularity. The advantages to todays busy cooks and those seeking to put healthy, yet quick, meals on their tables are real. Whether you choose an electric or a stove-top model, a pressure cooker makes creating wholesome meals from real, unprocessed foods in any cuisine a snap. From Paleo to Mediterranean diets, from clean eating to real food, this valuable cooking tool relieves the pressure to spend hours in the kitchen to feed your family (or yourself) healthily.